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

[ForsakenRoe]

Man I should have stayed in bed, so I wouldn't have to look at this mess

...and yet, the difference between a good and bad BLM is far larger than between a good and bad SMN. The difference will always exist, but the gap is relevant, and the more complex a Job is, the wider that gap gets. The point here is that the wider that gap is, the more people slipping up makes content unclearable, and that's bad. The wider the gap is, the more it punishes people on the bottom end of it (in terms of getting clears) for playing as they do now, and that's also bad. Your numbers seemed to indicate a gap of around 7-10% for a person using Glare and Dia every 30 sec, and that's...a big gap.

Would you prefer healers stay as they are or get something like the 4 Healers Model where at least some of them are to a complexity of your liking?

It's not a false choice - if the playerbase doesn't agree, then the Devs are very much likely to stick to the default/status quo, and I believe based on your past pessimistic comments about their design direction, you know this. As a compromise, it means people like me who enjoy healing now would continue to do so, and people like you who want more damage to juggle in your downtime would have that opportunity. If the alternative was ShB 3.0 in DT, would you prefer that? I think you wouldn't, but perhaps you would.

Also, "It's just a shortened DoT and a 15s CD"?

In bold are all the things that AREN'T "just a shortened DoT and a 15s CD".

THAT.
SAID:

Isn't this the proposal you had once where I said something to the effect of "Replace Assize with Water/Banish, scrap the gauge and just have Presence of Mind upgrade into Blessing of the Elements, and we've got a deal"? I may even have suggested a 60 sec CD for PoM/BoE so we'd get to interact with it more frequently.

I don't want another Faerie Gauge situation. Just make it PoM and replace Assize with Water/Banish. I'd be up for that, and this feels like deja vu me having said this before... Like...I DISTINCTLY remember suggesting replacing Assize with a GCD like that for the third element once somewhere, and I think it was in reply to one of your ideas... (I also suggested it somewhere else, but that was a second time.) I've also suggested having Water/Holy be a thing before, but that was separate.

Alsoalso: Agree with down with the barrier/pure divide, though you already know my solution to that is Pro/Shell being added to Plenary - something I believe you said you agreed with? We don't need a new Lily spender for that, we could just do THAT. And we already have a single target barrier with Benison. Just have Temperance give an AOE barrier and you've got that end covered, too.

My numbers indicate a 10% gap NOW. Under the gameplay you are demanding remains in the game in some form with your 4 healers thing. If it is acceptable to have that gap NOW, it's acceptable to have it in another design, especially when said design is less punishing by about half a percent, and has room for people to express their skill.

What I want does not matter, because the Devs don't listen to me, or you, or any of us. They'll do whatever they want for DT and nothing any of us say or do is likely to change a thing. They have some mythical 'data source' that tells them things like 'SCHs were forcing WHMs to do all the healing' and making changes based on that. Maybe they do what I ask for, maybe they do what you ask for, maybe they just leave everything as it is and we get SHB 3.0, 4.0 and even 5.0 with two new healing tools added each time that we didn't ask for, and struggle to find a use for

It's just a shortened DOT and a 15s CD, in terms of the damage side of the kit. You're a healer, so healing tools and additional complexity surrounding healing are completely acceptable, surely? Quake, Tornado and Flood are all automatically used by just doing the same rotation. You don't need to think 'oh I need to hold Quake for raidbuffs' because to do so would require that you stop casting your filler spell, and nobody wants that. But, if you don't need the healing from the heal, you could use it one GCD before raidbuffs go out, such that the next three GCDs of damage do naturally land within raidbuffs. That is intentional, because it gives the job an avenue to optimize on, and provides some more gameplay for players to interact with in things where the heal is completely unneeded (like EX roulette)

THAT. SAID: (was this necessary?)

Your constant asking of 'why don't we just replace X with Y' misses the point somewhat. For some jobs, it could work, yes. AST and SGE, I did exactly this, replaced X with Y in terms of effect, to keep button counts the same. For example, changing Krasis from '20% heal up on target' to 'next 4 cast times are made instant'. However, when you suggest something like 'replace Assize with Water', I'm not sure how much thought you have put into the ramifications of what that'd mean. WHM has already historically been the victim of this BS from SE's end. We lost Shroud, and got it given back as Lucid. We lost Stoneskin and got it back as Benison. We lost Divine Seal and got it back as Largesse, then lost that and got it back as Temperance. It'd be hard to get people excited about 'hey you get a new Water ability' if it's followed up with 'it replaces Assize'. Additionally, the damage lost from Assize being removed is 400p per 40s, or 1200 per 2min loop, that needs to be added back to the kit. If we assume it comes from Water (and that this Water is a 15s CD), then the damage gained by using 8 of those Waters instead of Glares (so 8X, where X = WaterPotency - GlarePotency) needs to be equal to the 3x Assize. So, 150p difference, making Water 460 compared to Glare's 310. And if we then take a player who will ignore Dia and Water, and just spam Glare, they'd do 7440p per minute, compared to the player who uses Dia and Water getting 8850. And percentagecalculator.net says... 84.06779661016948%. You've made the damage difference more punishing. The only way you'd get around this is to put all the damage onto Glare instead, which kind of misses the point of having a CD to press. It'd be like saying 'we are removing Upheaval, where do we put the damage? On Fell Cleave/Primal Rend? Nah, put it on Maim'

I don't see why you'd be against being able to apply barriers using a Lily. It allows a player to get mileage out of a Lily spend (to prep Misery) even when player HP is at 100%, and could open up gameplay where the WHM does a shield for a raidwide so that the 'barrier healer' doesn't have to spend a GCD doing so. The barriers would not be as strong as the SCH/SGE ones, so it'd mean working together to work out 'is the WHM barrier strong enough that we can get away with doing that to save a GCD instead of using a SCH/SGE one, or do we need to do bigger shields from the SCH/SGE, and have the WHM instead use that Lily to heal up after'. Additionally, as I've mentioned before, giving every healer semi-reliable access to shields means that the Devs can know that there's a shield available in any comp, meaning 'shield check' mechanics can be created, which would test the healer on how well they are healing (something people ask for a lot). A debuff, for example, that can be blocked by fully mitigating the raidwide that applies it. Or a knockback like Vulcan Burst from Ifrit/Ifrit EX/Ifrit in UWU. They can even make a graphic element for it, like how interruptible casts flash red, this could pulse say, green (customizable in options for colorblind accessibility), and have a shield icon on the bar to indicate it needs to be shielded against

I don't think anyone here who has suggested changes to healing has only thought of Savage, the reason they put more emphasis on more damage options is because it doesn't affect the skill floor in casual content, so those players don't get affected all that much. Savage players are in fact the ones that would "lose out" because now they have to work harder for a higher parse, which is the point anyway, because the complaint is that they're frequently feeling unengaged with the content because they're spamming 1 button for 80% of a fight. I'm fine with increasing healing requirements, and want that even in casual content, but it can only go so high, the game was not built for WoW-styled triage.

If anyone reads my stuff and thinks 'oh they are only thinking of Savage, what about me, the downtrodden casual in the EX roulette', they didn't do a very good job of reading what I wrote. How can you look at what I put for SGE, for example, where every standard GCD, including Diagnosis and Prognosis, has zero MP cost, and think 'yep that's a change that is for the Savage crowd'?

A 1% difference is even worse, that's 0.175% of the dps check required, that's an absolute non-issue.

As I've said before, Crit Variance will kill your run harder than any design I or any other forum user comes up with, trying to boogeyman about 'this will cause damage disparity and lead to enrage wipes' just reveals that the person trying to boogeyman hasn't done the maths, or has and is wilfully ignoring what the maths says to push their point

The point you, myself, and many others here are missing is that it really has nothing to do with the average player's ability to clear. If we were to do something like Roe's White Mage rework, the problem is that someone who engages with the added tools of Banish and the like is going to be numerically better than someone who just wants to spam Glare, or do as much as White Mage currently does and nothing further, regardless of how that does or doesn't influence clear rates.

They want to be rewarded and told they're a good player, without putting in the effort to actually be a good player? Say it ain't so /s

edit:

protraction is the kind of button that isn't strong enough to be interesting, either needs a buff or needs gone. Thematically I like that it's mini thrill though.

Protraction would immediately go from 'whats the point' tier to 'this is great' IMO, by letting us Deploy it. Functionally, it'd then be functionally identical to a shield worth '10% of the target's HP', allowing us to do more mitigation OGCD (replacing a Succor cast at times). Alternatively, it'd allow for us to do Protraction > Adlo (boosted now) > Deploy, and deploy both the Adlo and the Protraction at once for even harder mit, which would allow us (at times) to remove another mit and use it elsewhere (eg maybe Illumination can be shifted to something else).

That'd be interactivity within a healer kit, though, and 'this requires thought to make best use of'. We know SE doesn't want that