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

[ForsakenRoe]

answering it "Tell them their reward is not HAVING FUN and not BEING BORED (out of their F-ing minds)" and to "shut up about a WHOLE 2% dps variance".

I decided to try and do the maths on potencies and see how close I could get to the current potency per minute (PPM). As a baseline, not including any buffs like Presence of Mind, external buffs, prepping Misery's, anything, just me VS the dummy in a Glarefest. Currently 1min of combat looks to be 2 Dia's and 22 Glares, totaling 8140 potency. With the addition of Banish and the change to Dia's duration/potency, we'd theoretically get 5 Dia applications, totaling 2150, 4 Banish's at 1400, and the rest is 15 Glare's at 4650, with a grand total of 8200. If I really wanted to, I could probably work out maths to make it match the current total exactly, but I think it's close enough (and it being 8200 looks nice and neat)

From my original design post. And as has been mathed out several times, playing as you do now (that is, refreshing Dia when you see it falls off, and pressing Glare otherwise) would be 8040. And 8040 is '98.04878048780488%' of the potential 8200 of the new design. The only way to get around this inconvenient maths, is to massage the numbers with things like 'well what if I only want to press Dia twice per minute, instead of the suggested 5 times per minute?' To which I could counter, 'what if I just don't press Dia at all in the current design and cost myself 1430p a minute because I insist on playing incorrectly to prove a point?'

I'm not sure I, or others, are the ones who need to "shut up about a WHOLE 2% dps variance"

edit: oh lord three in a row idk if I can respond to all of this today

Fair enough, I agree. Hell, I think this is one of two things we agree on (the other being WHM needs a 1 min CD party mitigation, if I recall correctly).

I think my issue with the gauge is it's not clockwork like Misery. Since it's based on what DPS spells you cast, there are possibilities it isn't up at 1 min and 2 min, which isn't an issue with Misery/Lilies as they exist now. And I still think just turning Assize into a GCD, calling it "Water" from level 15 or so when you learn it to level 56 when it becomes Assize and level 80-90-something when it becomes Banish.

Also, for "several", it was Water/Banish, Quake, Tornado, Flood, and Blessing of the Elements. That's...5 (technically 6, but direct upgrades don't really count), 2 of which would also take up additional hotbar space.

I do appreciate, btw, even if perhaps not for the most altruistic reasons, that you did take into consideration the idea of your goal being less boredom and not a dps gap to lord over people...sorta. I still think you're comparing the wrong thing (glarespam vs optimal play instead of optimal play now vs optimal play then). The latter is what I'm talking about.

As to your reply to Aravell - provided encounters are tuned with current damage in mind, yes, that would work. Do you really think that would happen, though? If, as people often say, Devs tune for healer damage in mind, would they tune for that lower number or the higher one? That is, if playing like today did the same damage as now but playing the new way gets you 10% more, are the Devs going to tune Enrages for the lower number, such that people doing it are unimpacted but people doing it the new best way are finding encounters extremely easy to clear (they're doing something like 2-3% more DPS across the party if both healers are skilled with the new rotations), or do they tune it for the high end players to keep the prog experience and DPS check difficult the same, which then harms the people not doing that?

1: We also agree on 'Medica and Cure should probably upgrade to the sequel, instead of taking up hotbar space, after all, Medica 2 equals Medica 1 after just one tick of the HOT', in fact I'm the one who showed that those were the numbers iirc

2: My Misery is hardly ever up for 1min/2min. My priorities for using it are 'use the heal to heal', then 'use the heal/Misery cast for movement', THEN 'try and line it up with raidbuffs'. And the best part is, if I'm going to go for a funny coloured number (which I don't aim for specifically), it could be argued that it's better to do it that way, so that I keep all of the 'damage accredited' and I don't get a lucky Crit taxed by a raidbuff.

3: yes, 5 buttons. But three of them are Inner Chaos style 'this replaces another button based on context', so it's 2, as you say. But, as I say, Cure and Medica would ALSO be upgraded based on context (the context being that you hit level 30 or 50 respectively) and so it would equal out to 0 'additional keybinds'. You could say 'its still 2' because of my desire to bring down the Pure/Barrier wall, but that'd be done by adding a ST shield Lily spender, and an AOE version. And IDK about anyone else, but I still got a bit of space on my hotbars as WHM, definitely enough to fit two shielding abilities. If it's that much of a problem, I guess you could dispense with the ST version and only have the AOE version. That's the 'important one' that'd be instrumental in the downfall of the Pure/Barrier split

4: Sometimes I refer to 'literally only Glare' and 'current optimal rotation' as the term Glarespam interchangeably, this might cause confusion I agree. For what it's worth, I think when I mean 'literally only Glare', I make sure to also note 'literally only Glare'. The current 'optimal gameplay' for WHM, to me, still deserves the title of 'Glarespam', because even with Misery Prep tech, 75% of our minute-ly GCDs are Glare. In most comparisons, I am trying to compare 'optimal now' vs 'optimal in proposed design', only swapping to 'literally only Glare' to make points about the punishment factor of Dia, and how if you forget it at times, it's a loss to even put it back up due to it's low on-hit potency of 65 (something I tried to address by making mine 150 so it has some punch on cast)

5: The Aravell stuff, I would assume that, given my numbers above (and the current numbers, 8140 per min), the difference would be so small that it doesn't matter. SE would be able to keep the tuning as is and nothing (or exceptionally little) would change. Probably would make their job quite a lot easier in that case, and I'm sure that'd be quite a selling point, were I doing a Shark Tank/Dragon's Den style pitch to them at the board meeting. I think you might have got your wires crossed though, I don't recall me asking for a 10% more damage. Again, the only way to end up with anything like 10% (well, 14% technically) was to say 'I want to do exactly 2 Dia's, and 22 Glares, per minute, the exact same rotation as now'. And from what I know of raiding, SE already balances the raid in such a way that I could get away with horrendous DOT uptime anyway. They and me might well disagree on potencies, and how much 'playing perfectly' should grant extra compared to 'playing averagely'. I decided to try and keep the total output of 'playing the proposed design perfectly' quite close to 'playing current design perfectly', it was a kind of test of sorts to myself, to see how well I could get the maths to line up. And with a difference of only +60p per minute compared to the current, I think I did quite well. Of course, if you want it exactly the same as now, that's possible too. Just knock 15p off of Banish (such that it's +25 over Glare, rather than the proposed +40), and with 4 casts a minute, that lines it up exactly