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

[ChrysOCE]

Yeah yeah yeah. Just make more heal. DPS Bad! If a healer wants to DPS, they should play a DPS job, unless we're talking about tanks, they can have more DPS every expansion because they're not yucky healers. You don't think I deserve to enjoy the game. If only I had the ability to open my third eye and see the grand design that you see, then perhaps my dum dum DPS that thinks he's a healer brain could be happy.

We get it.

You know, you can try and argue without throwing out snide comments. Tanks can get DPS cause it doesn't change what they do, they still Tank. If anything, Tanks could stand to lose some mitigation (either actual or frequency) and have to rely on the healer. And still, no-one is seriously saying healers shouldn't DPS. But DPS shouldn't be what we do for 90+% of content.

[Aravell]

You know, you can try and argue without throwing out snide comments. Tanks can get DPS cause it doesn't change what they do, they still Tank. If anything, Tanks could stand to lose some mitigation (either actual or frequency) and have to rely on the healer. And still, no-one is seriously saying healers shouldn't DPS. But DPS shouldn't be what we do for 90+% of content.

I'm almost 100% certain that every single healer that's asking for more damage options also has said that they're fine with an increase in healing requirements. Just like there's no healer who seriously thinks that 100% of time spent healing is good, there's also no healer who thinks that 100% of time spent on doing damage is good. Once again, Stormblood struck this balance fairly well. There was no 90+% time spent on either only damage or only healing back then.

As for tanks having too much mitigation, if you try and tell any tank main that they should go back to being as tanky as they were back in Stormblood, they're definitely going to say no. SE isn't really going to nerf tank sustain at this point, tanks have grown too comfortable with it and they no longer think they should rely on healers to survive, also the dev team has a "buff everything else" approach over a "nerf the outlier" approach, so I'm expecting every tank to become as immortal as WAR in dungeons when Dawntrail arrives.

[Shougun]

I'm almost 100% certain that every single healer that's asking for more damage options also has said that they're fine with an increase in healing requirements. Just like there's no healer who seriously thinks that 100% of time spent healing is good, there's also no healer who thinks that 100% of time spent on doing damage is good. Once again, Stormblood struck this balance fairly well. There was no 90+% time spent on either only damage or only healing back then.

As for tanks having too much mitigation, if you try and tell any tank main that they should go back to being as tanky as they were back in Stormblood, they're definitely going to say no. SE isn't really going to nerf tank sustain at this point, tanks have grown too comfortable with it and they no longer think they should rely on healers to survive, also the dev team has a "buff everything else" approach over a "nerf the outlier" approach, so I'm expecting every tank to become as immortal as WAR in dungeons when Dawntrail arrives.

Admittedly tank's buffs didn't help at all, but I would like to say that yeah... I wouldn't love giving up the buffs at the point. I understand if it was needed in the end, but I really wouldn't love it lol.

Though I also would note if that was the only change then it wouldn't really mean much in the long run anyways. To fix the issue is going to need multiple fairly large scale changes, or to just toss the hands in the air, walk away from the heal issue, and give healers different tasks. If the only change is the nerf tanks I think I'd be more annoyed.

[Renathras]

It was always this way, it's just the devs are out of touch with how the job is played. Just because the dev disagrees, doesn't mean it wasn't.

I think you misunderstand the argument.

First, though - no, it wasn't always this way. Again, it wasn't in ARR. Some people optimizing stuff later in the expansion started doing it, and it went mainstream in HW. The Dev response was to nerf it.

But THAT gets at the actual point - it clearly isn't INTENDED to be this way by the Devs. Them being bad at encounter tuning doesn't change the fact of the intend they're going for.

The problem is this: The more time healers are required to spend actually healing, the less time they have to spend patching up people's mistakes.[/URL] That's the fundamental trade-off.

This is honestly the big counter in a practical sense. But there are solutions to that. For example, people messing up get damage downs instead of massive damage. Not to mention it's irrelevant in a world of pass/fail (one hit KO) attacks and body checks anyway. Other ways are to have healing "panic" buttons that are actually supposed to be used as panic buttons, not "healing plan" buttons.

So what happens if a bad healer queues for something - is the party just stuck in the instance until they git gud or are kicked?

You have literally this same exact problem if you make healers more DPS focused. Oh, your party now has a healer that sucks at doing their DPS rotation - ENRAGE! WIPE! FAIL DPS CHECK! - it's literally the same situation.

That's 2 non-free Medica II's, 11 non-free Cure II's, and one Glare Esuna. Three more GCDs devoted to Lilies, and one more Cure II thanks to Thin Air, and we up to 18 GCDs. At a 2.5sec GCD, you get 24 GCDs. Thus, I conclude that without reworking WHM's MP economy, the upper limit for how much time a WHM can spend healing is somewhere around 75% of the time. Furthermore, 66% of the active GCDs are Cure II, which is still one-button spam, just by a different name.

Two things to remember, though, are (a) no potential changes would happen in vacuum, they'd happen alongside other things changing, and (b) even single target "whack-a-mole" healing is more engaging than Glarespam for the simple reason you're prioritizing and switching targets. Contrast SCH Chain Strategem vs AST Arcanum. On paper, they're achieving the same general concept of thing - increasing the party's overall damage done to the boss for a short time - but clearly the AST version is more involved, even completely ignoring Astrodyne and Seals. This is because you're both prioritizing and selecting individual targets and using more frequent, single target versions (for the purposes of this discussion, Chain is a "party buff") instead of a party-wide one. If you don't like Chain, Searing Light or Embolden. Same argument.

While many players DON'T like whack-a-mole healing, many do, and that was the staple of what MMO healing was for over a decade (and still is in some games, just with more options of mallet to use).

So for example, the MP issue goes away as a "problem" if you just cut the cost of WHM spells by 25% (which, arguably, should already have been done anyway since it's dumb they cost more than AST with the same potencies despite WHM having no Astrodyne)

Sorry I was not home,...

The thing is, "if you observe the forums" and "the ones that are speaking out" are some PRETTY hefty qualifiers.

CLEARLY the ones that don't want more DPS skills are not "nonexistent". Of the 10 or so active posters in this thread, there are 3 of them (close to a third) and of the 40 or so individual posters, something like 5-10 (so 1/8th to 1/4th). And that's here, a place that isn't really cordial to that position. The healer forum, as I've pointed out before - even just after it happens (at which point the locals attack me instead) - is not friendly to dissenting views and actively drives away anyone who empresses the contra position. Here in General, you can see more people with the view that either we don't need more damage buttons/rotations on healers, or that we can use the existing buttons in more interesting ways, and there are more than a few that want to focus on more healing, not more damage.

So "nonexistent" isn't a valid term. It's an attempt to belittle and gatekeep. There clearly is sigh of "major...representation" here. And that's ignoring that many people who like healers now obviously aren't on the forums complaining.

This is for feedback - not ONLY negative feedback. As Synodic Scribe recently pointed out in his video, the problem comes when only the people dissatisfied are speaking and the people who are satisfied are not, as that leads to the Devs making changes to benefit the upset, that then upset the people that were content or even happy before. This forum is for ALL feedback, and this game NEEDS feedback from both those upset AND those happy. Or, in this case, both those that want more damage buttons AND those who do not. Changes will affect all of us, so we all need to speak, then the Devs can weigh how many voices are on each side to determine either an overarching change, a compromise, or a 4 Healers Model "something for everyone" split.

The idea of "just add them and if people don't like them, they'll complain" is bad. Imagine in SB someone saying "Just gut the healer DPS kits. If people are mad, they can complain then." And that's basically what DID happen. And look how poorly that turned out.

Clearly, you need the pros AND CONS of decisions BEFORE making them, not after making them.

ALSO a reason I think the 4 Healers Model is the best option, as it compartmentalizes changes so if they are bad/alienating to players, there's an escape hatch to save us.

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

This is ultimately the issue, and quite a few people are saying it at this point. The thing is...some people LIKE oGCD healing weaving heals between damage. It's their jam.

So the question is, how to satisfy both groups?

I say 4 Healers Model. So far, I haven't seen an alternative proposal that does satisfy both groups. Other proposals tend to favor one side at the expense of the other (often not realizing it/feeling that it's more of a compromise than it is), which just gets us back to the same situation with different people pissed off instead.

I know, I know, tired of hearing it, but we need a solution that does appeal to all sides, and no others have been proposed that do. Most either appeal to the more damage side and try to make it where it just doesn't matter "if you're bad" in casual content (which ignores people wanting to not have a damage rotation AND do hard content...as a HEALer), or are middle-point compromises that mean the non-damage side has to give up something (having more damage rotations forced on them) so the pro-damage side is less bored than they are now, but that won't ultimately satisfy them so they'll ask/demand more later anyway. None of those are permanent solutions, and none actually work by appealing to all sides of the discussion. They either favor one (damage) at the expense of the other (healing), or they are a "first step" middle that takes from the healers and gives to the damage dealers more and more over time, or they are an empty compromise that benefits the damage dealers and locks the healers out of difficult content and makes them "bads" in non-difficult content.

None of these are good solutions.

[Sebazy]

You have literally this same exact problem if you make healers more DPS focused. Oh, your party now has a healer that sucks at doing their DPS rotation - ENRAGE! WIPE! FAIL DPS CHECK! - it's literally the same situation.

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? It doesn't even have to be optimal damage, I did just fine with my consistently grey logs in Entropy. Outside of that end of the content spectrum your comment holds no water whatsoever. Where are the dps checks in dungeons and alliance raids? What modern Extreme is tuned so tightly that healer DPS will make or break the run assuming the DPS are staying alive and pressing buttons?

2) Don't engage in hyperbole.

Don't make me tap the sig sir.

[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-)

.

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.

[Renathras]

The only acceptable solution to this issue is to deal with everything wrong with the healer role equally. In no particular order:

1) Healing requirements too low
2) Healing kit power bloat
3) Tanks and DPS bringing too much healing/shielding utility
4) Uninteresting healing and damage kit

If only one aspect is addressed, that's only pleasing one subsection of the healer playerbase, that's not an acceptable solution after so many years of failing design.

With you UP TO HERE.

After here, though, is where we disagree in the sense the opposite is what's most often seen here - people insisting we add some more damage abilities and call it a day. Yes, it's true the "more DPS buttons" people never say they're against raising healing requirements...except they do all the time. The "Then the baby healers won't be able to heal and will wipe parties!" people actually do oppose raising healing requirements... <_<

Okay, they want to keep healer dps simple, and I get the reasoning... but why does it need to be the copy paste nuke+dot for the filler actions for everyone?

Can one of the healers not have a dot and to make up for it, a complex card system to be actively used every 30s and not just in the burst windows?
Can one of the healers have a longer cast on their nukes again (with corresponding potency) since they have Ruin 2 to create double weaving windows and movement?
Can one of the healers not have a dot and have a combo system instead for filler complexity?
Can one of the healers stay as the current dps model for a simpler option?

I've proposed this for years and the people arguing for more DPS buttons have shot it down again and again. They PARTICULARLY hate that last one - one healer staying the same for a simpler option.

My own proposal for about two years has been this:

WHM - stay the way it is.
SCH - get its SB kit back (DoTs mainly)
AST - get its SB kit back (Cards mainly; becomes more focused on buffing with Cards having a short CD like 10 or 15 sec so you're more often throwing them out and trying to keep higher support/buffing uptime instead of DoT uptime)
SGE - be a Disc Priest that actually heals by properly executing a damage rotation.

I've been told, by the "more DPS buttons" people in the Healer forum (which are many of the ones in this thread), that this is unacceptable.

But I call it "The 4 Healers Model". Specifically, we have 4 healer Jobs and we CLEARLY have more than 1 type of Healer player. So outside of introducing specs and other stuff that FFXIV isn't going to do at this point, the best solution is to have one healer tack to each of those categories like you listed. That way, people who like a specific type of thing can jump on that healer Job, and we can enjoy this shared space together without stepping on each other's toes.

At this point, I don't think there is another solution that does address everyone's needs. It's not perfect - nothing is - but it's closer than most. Glad we can agree on it, more or less.

[Aravell]

Yes, it's true the "more DPS buttons" people never say they're against raising healing requirements...except they do all the time. The "Then the baby healers won't be able to heal and will wipe parties!" people actually do oppose raising healing requirements... <_<

I'm going to explain reality to you one more time, maybe you'll finally see it this time. The people who want damage options are saying that adding damage options is the lesser destructive option to weaker healers because they are required to heal by the game and not required to do damage by the game. Note that I said by the game, pressure to do damage applied by other players is irrelevant to the discussion.

[UkcsAlias]

As healer im going to state that the dps kits of all 4 must remain quite similar. Otherwise it creates a big vulnerability in which a healer can become dominating by having significantly higher dps than others. Which should be avoided. This means the 1111 is most likely going to remain a significant part (and i actualy think that is fine).

I think the focus should be more about giving the dps some extra skill potential by simply making 1111 alone not cut it anymore. SCH might have a few charges it can spend on dps. But its a minimal effect as you often want to preserve the charges for actual heals (extremes and unreals demand enough here already, so if you can use the charges, it feels as a reward enough).

But this means 2 dps buttons chained in each other. And idealy introducing a condensed system here so it can be expanded later without changing too much. ie: at lvl 100 you have 112112112 as optimal combo (the 2nd 1 cast triggers the other ability to be available), but at 110 it could be 1121211212 (chain is expanded to 3 where the other one now has 2 abilities it can chain into). It keeps the buttons compact here, which to me is still an important part. We dont have room for many dps abilities. Maybe at 105 you also expand the AoE to also trigger into that combo, giving that new button a potential 3 diffirent abilities as outcome). Its a quite future proof way to expand the kit.
Difficult? not realy, but it allows the minimal improvement in dps that is still desired as a skill measurement system.
(and yes, 220 main potency and 300 on the 2 cast is a fine enough value to work with, proper chaining then means about 20% higher dps which is fair enough without forcing too much distraction)

If healers get a 123 combo that must be repeatedly pressed, thats just going to be anoying when they want to add more conditionals, as that means condensing has to happen again. I rather have them be ahead here and introduce the condensing earlier.

[fulminating]

To Ren,
You have doubtless been in a 20 minute expert dungeon. This is a more acceptable outcome to most than timing out or having to quit because only the healer is simply unable to perform to a high enough standard to get through the boss. Healers already have a disproportionate amount of responsibility, I really can’t see bloating it further being a particularly good move. Then again random dps tend to be unaware that feint/addle and even tactidour samba can be helpful.

Is this an ideal solution? No. But it’s probably the better of a bad bunch.

For extra clarity, I haven’t seen anyone ask for 21111111 to be changed to 01189998819991197253 rotations, just another button and maybe timer to keep track of.