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

[IDontPetLalas]

I'm curious, if you could make a single relatively small change (no, "revert all changes to 'x'" isn't a small change imo) to improve healers, what would it be?

For me, I only have level 60 healers, but already I can see how much I'm just pressing the same dps button over and over again with a single dot thrown out now and then. I don't know how much that changes, but it'd be nice to have another ability that I could press regularly (not on a 60 second CD) that did damage. That would be my one change.

Note, I know nothing about healers, but as I'm levelling all my other jobs, I'm slowly learning.

The part you questioned? The answer is, it doesn't. That is your downtime, get ready to replace your "1" key.

Before someone steps in with "oh actually", yes, AST (for example) gets earthly star (on 60 seconds) macrocosmos (3 min) and cards (usually held for to sync with other buffs) - but that's about it.

[Thurmnmurmn]

The part you questioned? The answer is, it doesn't. That is your downtime, get ready to replace your "1" key.

Before someone steps in with "oh actually", yes, AST (for example) gets earthly star (on 60 seconds) macrocosmos (3 min) and cards (usually held for to sync with other buffs) - but that's about it.

This just makes me think of my orthos runs I healed in (as a whm). We would get a no ability floor and I legit would not notice until I see assize doesn't work.

[Gemina]

I know this thread has been going on for a bit and I am just chiming in. However, this topic goes back many moons. Definitely at least as far as my join date. The main points are typically made within the first couple of pages and then they tend to be reiterated. That being said, I knabbed a few of them. I'm not contesting these views, but rather making a generalized statement that I feel is applicable to the state of healing.

Surely giving them 1-2-3 combos isn't enough, they have too many buttons already. So to make them more interesting you would have to twist their skills a little bit. I don't play every healer so I can't give an opinion about all of them, but here's what I would do with the ones that I play:

Scholar

Energy Drain - Doesn't cost any Aetherflow. Instead it gives Aetherflow I, have 3 charges and 20 second cooldown.
Aetherflow - Restores 10% MP instead, costs 1 Aetherflow.

I basically swapped Energy Drain with Aetherflow. This would make you deal damage consistently without having to grief your party by spending all Aetherflow stacks in Energy Drain. That will be at the cost of a more inconsistent MP gain, and a more strategic use of your resources (but at least you're not spending every resource on damage).

White Mage

Stone and Glare are two separate GCDs instead of one being the upgrade of the other. Stone gives a stacking debuff to the targeted enemy that does nothing on it's own and can be stacked up to 5 times. Glare consumes this debuff and deals damage based on the amount of stacks. Dia also gives 1 stack per DoT tick. Using Glare on max stacks also speeds the Lily Gauge.

literally just revert SCH's damage kit to how it was before Shadowbringers. it is the easiest and least intrusive way to make that specific job way more engaging.

Hmm, well I've done DSR on Scholar and that's a very pressing and busy fight that requires a lot of GCD shield casts, and the "simple DPS rotation" is still boring as sin, so...? It sounds to me like you just have an insanely unrealistic expectation of the amount of GCD healing this game should/could have.

When healer engagement is brought up, skills and rotations are very commonly the theme. It is not up to me to dictate what is and is not fun for players. Personally speaking though, I've never been engaged by any rotation in this game. Even DPS rotations, and they only tend to just add more to the frustration level than anything else the more extensive they are. Healers have never had any kind of true DPS rotation, but even having more skills at my disposal such as 3.x SCH still did not provide the engagement I experience when playing a healer in FFXIV.

That being said, a job's abilities and the harmonious flow of its skills provide only a very small portion of the fun with playing any particular job, and specifically a role. This includes healers. No matter how simple or complex a rotation, once it becomes second nature there is very little enjoyment to be found here. I can take any job in this game and practice on a striking dummy, and whether it is SAM, MNK, BLM, DRK, GNB, or any other non-healer job they all become as boring as a healer rotation after a certain point. What makes any flow of skills aka 'rotation' fun to do is when the enemy throws things at you to disrupt it, and you the player find improvisations in order to maintain the GCD. This is how it is for DPS roles, and does also extend to tanks, though they have additional responsibilities to consider.

Healers has always been an issue because they are technically a magically ranged class, and it is exceptionally easy to keep their GCD rolling. If the devs were to toss a skill or two in there that requires them to be in melee range such as SGE's Phelgma, or WHM's Holy, it immediately becomes more interesting. However, even these skills have their limits. Whether you have healed just casual content, or have done the hardest Ultimate to date, this really isn't going to change much.

Personally speaking, no matter what content I was healing, the only thing that made it engaging was when my finger wasn't pushing the DPS button at all, because my GCD allocation had be used towards healing the party. Unfortunately, the higher skill level of the group, the less likely this is going to happen. The most fun I've ever had as a healer is when the S**t hits the fan. I constantly seek this out. It makes me think of Zenos and how bored he is until his limits are pushed by the WoL. Like him, I'm constantly looking for encounters that push my skill as a healer to its very limits. THAT is when I am having the most fun. Unlike Zenos though, who has to seek an adventurer of exceptional strength and skill; healers have to seek out the opposite. This I feel is the true flaw.

How can the dev team emulate this in an encounter though? I believe this is what needs to be explored. We're not getting anywhere discussing skills and rotations.

[ForsakenRoe]

What makes any flow of skills aka 'rotation' fun to do is when the enemy throws things at you to disrupt it, and you the player find improvisations in order to maintain the GCD. This is how it is for DPS roles, and does also extend to tanks, though they have additional responsibilities to consider.

Wouldn't that logic also apply then to healers, if they actually had a rotation of sorts that could be disrupted?

An example would be the 15s Banish CD I brought up several times. I'd make it an instantcast so it could be used for mobility. If there's a mechanic which demands mobility from the player, that happens while Banish is still on CD, you don't have it for the mechanic. The 'optimal' solution would then be to purposely delay using Banish to use it instead to keep the GCD rolling in that mechanic. That mechanic has successfully 'disrupted' the rotation for the WHM, because they are not able to use Banish at the time they would normally want to (every 15s on the dot). But because of the player's skill, foresight, etc, they are able to counteract that 'disruption' and play around it, making what is intended by the fight design to be a 'damage loss' into a 'damage gain'. Which makes the player feel good for coming up with a solution to the problem posed

An alternative example would be any big healing moment. As it stands, the only thing that can happen to a WHM in a Styx/Harrowing Hell situation, is that Dia falls off and you can't refresh it at 'the right time', losing some ticks of the DOT. With additional abilities in the kit, however, this means decisions have to be made on the fly. If you find you can spare exactly 2 GCDs in Harrowing Hell, do you spend them on Dia or Banish? Do you spend them back to back, or spread them out? If you spread them out, would you be able to use them both on Dia (given that it's 12s duration under my design)?

IDK, it seems kinda obvious to me that if 'DPS and Tanks can derive 'fun' in trying to keep their rotation going while the fight design tries to impede them via mechanics', then the same logic would work for healers. Doubly so, considering 'have to stop and heal' is a potential mechanic for a healer to face. The issue though IMO is not just 'the game doesn't try to stop the healer's rotation often enough' like others suggest. That's only part of the problem, really. The real problem is that we don't have anything to interrupt. Whenever we have to heal, 90% of the time that translates to 'we lose a Glare/Malefic/the other two'.

But another potentially interesting quirk of this, is that when we have more skills with potencies that are higher than the filler, the times where a filler spell is removed by a required GCD heal are less punishing comparatively. Here's an example: Two raidwides are going to hit the party, 3 GCDs apart from one another. The first happens 1sec before Dia falls off, and the second, 8 seconds later (giving 3 GCDs of space to heal). Banish will also be up in 6s time from the moment the first raidwide hits. With this, rather than immediately healing after the raidwide, a player could go Dia > heal (replacing the filler Glare) > Banish > 2nd raidwide, to preserve the maximum amount of damage output while keeping the party alive. What we have right now is a game of 'how can I minimize the amount of Glares I lose?', what we could have is something more akin to 'how can I minimize the amount of damage I lose, and if I have to lose anything, how do I reorganize my healing timings, such that it's my Glare that I lose each time I'm forced to Medica2/Cure3?'

[Turtledeluxe]

I disagree that a rotation is irrelevant to job identity or job fun. It isn't that a rotation needs to be complex, it just needs to feel good to execute. Despite people commonly saying BLM is "the hardest class omg"-- it really isn't as far as the rotation goes. The rotation is pretty straightforward but it feels relevant to its lore/premise, has a sense of progression, leads to suitable payoff (or not if you drop it). This is the question we should ask of every Job...because even as a DPS sometimes things die so fast it feels like my damage is pointless. So why do I play anyway? Because the core loop is fun.

I would argue if devs can't make encounters healing intensive for for various reasons, what will keep people invested in the healer classes is distinct gameplay even if they all have the same effects and results. Why can't AST be a slightly more complex rotation if the lore itself allows for that? Because some people won't play it or take it to TOP? The dev team needs to accept the reality not every class is going to be for everyone and every meta all the time. They need to design classes with unique quirks and challenges like they did in the first place.

[SargeTheSeagull]

I'll take the bait. Ren, what precisely is the "4 healer model" and why would it be better than anyone else's suggestions? You don't need to go into the nitty gritty details, just a general outline.

[ty_taurus]

I'll take the bait. Ren, what precisely is the "4 healer model" and why would it be better than anyone else's suggestions? You don't need to go into the nitty gritty details, just a general outline.

The spark notes is change Scholar, Astrologian, and Sage to address healer criticisms, make them each unique with a wider array of DPS tools and interactive healing, but leave White Mage alone. In other words, we have 4 healers, so make 4 distinct healers.

What’s kind of ironic is the alternative suggestions proposed by those who oppose also would result in 4 distinct healers, just one with a different white mage instead of the current white mage remaining unchanged.

[SargeTheSeagull]

The spark notes is change Scholar, Astrologian, and Sage to address healer criticisms, make them each unique with a wider array of DPS tools and interactive healing, but leave White Mage alone. In other words, we have 4 healers, so make 4 distinct healers.

What’s kind of ironic is the alternative suggestions proposed by those who oppose also would result in 4 distinct healers, just one with a different white mage instead of the current white mage remaining unchanged.

... Why leave WHM the way it is??? Surely whatever changes could be made to WHM would be largely ignorable if you want to spam medica 2 and occasionally hit glare like people do currently.

[IDontPetLalas]

... Why leave WHM the way it is??? Surely whatever changes could be made to WHM would be largely ignorable if you want to spam medica 2 and occasionally hit glare like people do currently.

Bingo, you summarized 2 years of back and forth posts.

[ForsakenRoe]

Why can't AST be a slightly more complex rotation if the lore itself allows for that? Because some people won't play it or take it to TOP? The dev team needs to accept the reality not every class is going to be for everyone and every meta all the time. They need to design classes with unique quirks and challenges like they did in the first place.

Agreed to an extent, the problem with the first part is that while I (and others) suggest WHM remain 'the simple to execute healer', there are voices that say WHM should remain exactly as it currently is. The problem with the second part is that SE has a pretty good track record of avoiding the problem of 'you're playing the wrong class, reroll or accept you can't clear this content idiot'. Abyssos and it's 1% too much HP showed how bad a reaction the playerbase has to being told 'sorry you're playing the wrong class'. If it's a case of 'every class can clear, but some have tools better suited to the encounter', then that's more acceptable, as long as each class has their moment to shine. Macrocosmos in P3S felt great, being able to delete a mechanic. The issue with it was that WHM did not delete any mechanics on the same scale as Macro could. Fountain of Fire, or Firestorms of Asphodelos, could have been WHM's 'moment to shine' by having enough hits in a row to make it hard for an AST to cover everything (since they have only 15y range on their kit), while Lilybell would handle it with relative ease.

We get some 'WHM moments' now thanks to multi-hit stack markers, or bleed-raidwides. The issue with them is that anything WHM can 'easily handle', AST has to be able to handle too, so the 'extra healing power' WHM brings is often just 'surplus to requirements'. I think WHM needs a new 'identity' carved out for it, because 'heals bigger' isn't cutting it, and hasn't cut it since AST got 'fixed' in one of the HW patches. We've seen what I'd do: make it all about using damage neutral healing GCDs, and piling up multiple refunds at once, so that when the burst window comes, you unleash everything at once for a massive burst. In a way, it'd be like WAR's IR. Just, it wouldn't auto-crit

... Why leave WHM the way it is??? Surely whatever changes could be made to WHM would be largely ignorable if you want to spam medica 2 and occasionally hit glare like people do currently.

As others have said (was trying to solo Seiryu for WT, couldn't), this is the problem most of us have with the idea. We agree with the premise (four healers, should have four distinct playstyles), we just disagree with the assertion that one must remain exactly as it is.