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

[Renathras]

I don't think they actually have to go full-on pruning on OGCD stuff, I think they could be repurposed to bring resource management back as a healer system. If they add MP costs or limit them in other ways, most of the OGCD stuff can stay as they would feed into the mini-game of resource management. Of course, in an ideal world, the strongest OGCDs should have the heftiest costs so they would be actual last resorts.

Agreed with this. I'm...not sure any oGCDs in the game have MP costs, but there's no reason they COULDN'T. Trade MP for responsiveness and a potent effect. Pneuma is a GCD that has an MP cost while having a CD, so I can't think of any reason oGCDs couldn't work that way as well. Aside from the ones directly tied to a resource (Lilies, Aetherflow), maybe, the rest having MP costs would make more choice between "Use Prognosis with a 2 sec cast at 600 MP for 300 potency of healing or use Ixochole as an instant cast oGCD weave but with a 1000 MP cost" is actually a decision, where, right now, there's no case Ixochole isn't the better answer in pretty much any content.

(just for a certain little shit,

You're fortunate I'm not a hall monitor personality type. Pretty sure that's a TOS violation.

I, too, play all roles, and often have to fill for DPS since people don't want to do it and apparently it's boring. And occasionally Tanking since that is too stressful for a lot of people. Anecdote is anecdote, I guess.

Seriously though, I'd question just how much experience you actually have on this matter or if it's just your opinion/preference and little else?

To be fair, what determines someone's fun IS opinion/preference, is it not? So when advocating for designs to be fun (to the person), that's the only thing that actually IS relevant in the end: Is it fun (for them) to play or isn't it.

I think the focus needs to be much more on making the healer role feel needed, valued and powerful again. I get that people prefer self-sustain versus being reliant on few others but the degree this has taken on is simply depressing. It feels to me like, taking P11S as an example, two healers are only brought because its a habit and there are mechanics that need to target two non-tank players predictably.

The push for mitigations and shields surely has not helped this either because it makes pure healers ever more obsolete. Looking at Criterion, to bring a pure healer is actually a liability compared to a shield healer.

Absolutely agreed with...all of this.

It's one thing for a PLD to be able to drag themselves through a 4 man boss fight while tanking their DPS to keep themselves and one DPSer alive, it's quite another for a WAR + DNC + SAM to go through an entire 4 man dungeon with their healer AFK at the zone-in with out noticing much difference, or for Ultimate encounters to have such (relatively) little healing that a party of just Tanks and DPS can heal all they actually need to.

I just feel that it really sounds like Stormblood job design is the most ideal middle ground for what everyone wants. Not as complex as HW, but not so drastically simplified as ShB/EW?

SOOOOMEwhat. SB WHM was horrible design. See this thread if you're curious: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ld-be-combined...

...studiously avoided because it kind of exposes the lie that SB was peak healer design, as it wasn't for WHM specifically. EW WHM + Aero 3 would be better design than SB WHM.

Now, if we were talking SCH and AST SB designs? That I more or less agree with, though there are some post-SB things worth keeping, like Expedience and Microcosmos.

Also, for reference: Tank ques are still mostly instant other than for 24 mans, where DPS actually have the fastest ques. Healer Jobs/players as a percentage of the playerbase were lowest in Stormblood, I think it was, from what little public data there is. Objectively less people played healers in SB than any other expansion, and more play healers in EW than did in ShB and SB. That's probably the Dev logic for keeping healers the way they are. That and it makes tuning encounters easier for them. <_<

Maybe they saw the data on 'percentage of playerbase playing healer as their main' drop and panicked, not realizing 'yeh that was probably because you added RDM and SAM in the same expansion, two VERY highly revered jobs from older games, so of course some healers would change mains to one of those two and not go back'.

Honestly, the first part of that is a good chunk of it. Release two DPS Jobs in an expansion with no healers or tanks, ques will go nutty. I'm genuinely shocked they think it's a good idea to do again in DT, but...we'll see how THAT works out, I guess. Viper as a pirate/swashbuckler/rogue and Green Mage having a cult following and, if a DoT mage like old SMN; collectively those two could hit us with SB era ques all over again.

Disagree on your assessment of SB WHM. The problem wasn't WHM being a "pure healer" in SB. The problem was the mechanics of WHM were STUPID on SB. 20% chance of generating a Confession stack by casting Cure 1 on people? 50% chance of generating a Lily by casting Cure 1 on people AND the Lily didn't do anything but lower the CD of the next Benison, Assize, or Asylum cast (and woe be unto those who had to cast Benison and waste 3 Lilies on an all of 6 second shorter CD)? Those were HORRIBLE design mechanics. Even once they changed Confession stacks to be based on using AOE heals, then it was just "How much would you like to overheal for today, sir?", which wasn't a matter of being a pure healer, it was a matter of bad mechanics. Current Plenary, for example, is way more useful since it is just a flat healing buff to AOE heals without all the dancing around stacks, and current Lilies are probably the best change ever made to WHM.

Also, "water spells"? You mean that one oGCD that had a knockback and root? Recall in SB is when they removed the damage component from Fluid Aura, meaning as a "middle ground", SB WHM didn't use Fluid Aura in combat.

...I gotta stop being so invested in this stuff, these posts are getting too long

Heh, now you know how I feel. "One of us! One of us!"

Not to turn a healer thread into a BLU thread lol, but...

Fair point about not being able to cancel. I love Passage of Arms and Collective Unconscious. I hate that the only "right" way to use them is to "flash" them. I remember my first E8S clear using and holding Passage of Arms as the soft enrage intensified and the healers were being overwhelmed. Was an oddly good feeling of blocking/protecting for my party while they were able to finish off the boss's health. That's those "moments of epicness" that I think games should strive for, not limit. Flip side: Pressing a button then having to sit there and bite your fingernails watching your party try to finish the encounter is kind of less fulfilling than it could be (I've seen an argument for letting PLD use Shield Bash while under PoA without it breaking the effect so that they can at least do SOMEthing).

I liked ARR SMN gameplaywise, I just thought thematically it was a bad SMN...

I agree, though I think the Job just got worse with each expansion basically bolting something on. ShB SMN was not a work of art, it was a work of accident. It WORKED, but in the way a person dropping cards one by one from a 3 story building managed to build a house of cards by accident, and one risking total collapse each time they roll the dice adding another to it.

...but, that doesn't matter in the sense I believe that people DID like it, and thus at the very least that playstyle should have been preserved, even if it was through a new Job being added (e.g. Green Mage DoT mage maybe...?). Because I genuinely believe the game can accommodate all types of players and we can all enjoy this shared space together, but that requires Jobs being different in play and appealing to those different types of players.

I absolutely love current SMN, but I feel it either should have been a new Job added (Evoker? Could even have had it split from ACN just like SMN does if they wanted to go that route) OR taken the old SMN's gameplay and copied it into a new Job so at least the playstyle persisted (e.g. take all the abilities, change them to just poison/virus/biohazard/etc theme instead of egi/pet themed, and introduced Green Mage with EW with the DoT playstyle minus Bahamut and Phoenix; hell, they could have even kept the pet theming by making them Voidsent or something for it).

That is, I'm not a fan of...have you ever read the Sword of Truth/Legend of the Seaker books?

In it, the system of magic has two halves, positive magic and negative. The simplest example was given in the book by the wizard making his beard grow longer (adding to/positive magic). He then started to shave and was asked why he didn't just make it grow shorter, and he replied that powerful as he is, he can only use positive magic (adding to), he can't use negative magic (taking away from).

I think Job design, evolution, and addition over time in a game should always abide by the principle of positive magic: It should always add to what was before, not take away.

Hell, if we had that today, we could have EW WHM and SB SCH coexisting side by side and this entire thread would probably not exist.

It's why I say grabbing a bunch of stuff that was removed from SCH in ShB and readding it to the kit would be nice, but taking all three healers and shoving them into SB kits would not. The latter is just another form of negative magic - taking away without replacing - just like changing SMN without adding Green Mage did.

The reason why I asked in this thread in specific, that healing is a binary functionality. You need heals until the HP bars are full, which is something already achievable with probably a single oGCD from both healers. So, in that front... there's literally nothing else to add without being redundant.

Right, but this is as true as damage dealing abilities. You don't need a new damage button to do damage, your existing buttons do. As long as boss health/enrage is tuned around your existing buttons, you don't need to ever add a new damage button. Adding a new one also results in boss health/enrages being increased, meaning you HAVE to use them to do the same (relative/effective) performance you did before. GNB got Double Down, but boss health increased so using Double Down doesn't kill, say, P4S any faster than NOT having Double Down in E4S. The encounters shift to your kit, so you're not actually gaining anything, you're running in place.

Part of the reason we're in the mess we're in with healing is because Tank mitigation ISN'T capped. Tanks have so much mitigation (and sustain) now that it borderline makes healers unnecessary. Clearly they have "too much". So that doesn't work.

And DPSers having more filler doesn't mean you need new abilities, it means the existing abilities need to be retuned to have more use in the downtime phase. For example, NIN is super busy in burst but then has a lax downtime. Why? Because it doesn't have enough damage abilities? Surely not, it has more abilities than the average Job (34 or something like that; average is ~32-33). Give NIN a new big damage button with a 1 or 2 min CD and what happens? It just gets added to the burst phase. Instead, existing buttons need to have different CDs. Instead of everything being 2 min and a few things being 1 min, it needs some of those CDs changed to 40 sec. For example, imagine if TCJ's CD was 40 sec instead of 120 sec. Now you'd use it in the opener, use it twice in filler over the next two minutes to break up the 1-2-3 spam with a little quick paced Ninjusu magic, and then it would still line up with the 2 min burst. So even without breaking out of the 2 min meta, you'd get more action points. Alternatively, 30 sec abilities.

The problem isn't that DPS Jobs don't have enough DPS buttons. The problem is that their CDs are all 1 min or 2 min, meaning outside of those mini-burst and main-burst windows, you have a pretty boring filler of "upkeep personal buff" and "don't overcap gauge".

That's been a staple in this game since the beginning and everyone will tell you that.

A lot of people will SAY that, but it's never really been true. WHM in ARR wasn't a Job focused only (or totally) on DPS, and DPSing was NOT more important than healing, not even for SCH.

That's not "all a healer needs", that's "all a DPSer wanting to play a healer needs".

I almost stood up and clapped when he said he can't stand people who don't want to improve. Preach.

A bit late on this. Just got around to watching it.

The problem is he does in that video what you guys do: Only seems to think there's one kind of improvement - improving your DPS rotation.

People wanting to improve something else; what are they?

You seem to have this idea stuck in your head that they have to balance for either the peak or the canyon, have you ever considered that they can balance for the average?

Same problem. Balance for the middle and the lower half that can clear content now no longer will be able to, thus leading to them being harmed/bothered.

It doesn't work unless you balance to the bottom.

And while I agree with Yoshi P's statement, as you are well aware, people have consistently pointed out it is balanced around.

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I didn't avoid your question, it's not relevant. That said, for what it's worth, if you believe people should do worse than you and should not be clearing content, that is elitist by the gaming definition and commonly accepted general meaning of the term. Don't go playing dictionary police now, you know exactly what I meant by it because of the common use/definition.

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EDIT:

Well...maybe the length is shorter/better. Hm...

[Aravell]

It doesn't work unless you balance to the bottom.

Uh huh, doesn't work according to who? Why are your anecdotes any more important than anyone else's? The only argument you have against any of this is that you've been in some parties that didn't work out. But if we look at things logically, a good player will balance out a bad player, meaning balancing for the middle will have the highest chance of pleasing everyone. Also, full grey teams can still clear extremes, we're talking about extremes here, not the content that casuals won't even touch, like week 1 savage and ultimates.

I didn't avoid your question, it's not relevant. That said, for what it's worth, if you believe people should do worse than you and should not be clearing content, that is elitist by the gaming definition and commonly accepted general meaning of the term. Don't go playing dictionary police now, you know exactly what I meant by it because of the common use/definition.

Even if you use the gaming definition, you're still wrong. I never once said people should be doing worse than me and that people who do worse than me shouldn't be clearing content, you can try and quote me where I said that, go ahead, I'll wait. The only thing I said is that skill ceiling should be higher and that mastery should be rewarded, anything other than that is just your made-up caricature of me.

Alternatively, if you're cool with labeling people things they're not now, then I'll give you the label of Sylphie. If you tell me that's not cool and you're not a Sylphie, then you're kind of a hypocrite because it's now a "rules for thee but not for me" situation. But if you're willing to apologise for the label, I'll drop it entirely, your move.

[Zairava]

Same problem. Balance for the middle and the lower half that can clear content now no longer will be able to, thus leading to them being harmed/bothered.

It doesn't work unless you balance to the bottom.

And while I agree with Yoshi P's statement, as you are well aware, people have consistently pointed out it is balanced around.

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I didn't avoid your question, it's not relevant. That said, for what it's worth, if you believe people should do worse than you and should not be clearing content, that is elitist by the gaming definition and commonly accepted general meaning of the term. Don't go playing dictionary police now, you know exactly what I meant by it because of the common use/definition.

I'm probably wasting my time, but whatever, I want to get my voice in while we have time before Dawntrail launch.

What makes this so impossible? They ALREADY did during Stormblood when they made cleric stance a role action.

I'm absolute trash at healers beyond maybe EX. You will never see me doing healer in savage and above running it because I do not trust myself with it, not even in its current state.

This isn't about "making it so that others can clear content but I can", it's about making it more fun for everyone.

You get your one gcd spell, and you get your DoT. That. is. it. There's NOTHING to learn past that unless you consider sage's Addersting some complex war machina level of thought. It inherently makes the leveling process more boring than it needs to be because, get this, they make normal mode content so mind-numbingly easy it doesn't need all the healing in your over-bloated healing kits unless your party is eating the dirt from the ground, and even then we have so much mitigation in the way of utility from other roles it hardly even matters. Use mits, use 2-3 healing spells (which don't often necessitate GCD healing), done. This goes for both single target and aoe.

I'm a part of the "silent majority" of healers people love bringing up because I mostly just level them and only heal when I feel like healing for friends because I don't want my brain cell count to decrease more than it already has. Plus I lurk here. Even for someone who has than brain capacity of a fly regarding healers. I am the below-average.

Every single time, without fail, I see healer discussion get interrupted for this ridiculous belief it absolutely 100% has to be designed around the lowest common denominator of players. I do not want that, I do not want healing to be "damage neutral" because that removes the entire premise of healing in exchange for dps.

I've seen people do what should be considered entire math thesis's at this point and it still doesn't satisfy you. It never has and never will.

I do not need to have things so completely infantilized so that I can clear savage and ultimate down to the value of 1 dps on the meter. I couldn't care less how much damage I'm doing as a healer. What I want is for healers to be fun across the board, not just in high-end content, but in casual play too. I don't need to hear about "subjective/objective", I don't need to hear "oh well SOME HEALERS". no.

I am objectively below average with healers and I'm still bored when I play them despite barely touching them because they provide me with literally nothing more to learn. Having a couple extra dps abilities isn't going to kill me, I will still clear normal mode content just fine. DPS checks in normal mode content have been trivial since Shadowbringers. If people don't like the tighter dps checks or higher difficulty of high-end content, regardless of any role they play, they will simply take their leave. Just as I have taken my leave of healing ever in high-end. I don't want the healers who want even the slightest amount of raising to the skill ceiling to be ignored just because players like me exist. They simply will not do a massive increase in healing needed, I would be genuinely surprised if they did. So I will settle for a couple more dps abilities while throwing the forbidden numbers in the toilet.

[Renathras]

Uh huh, doesn't work according to who?

According to the position of "If you can clear content now, you can clear that same level/type of content post-change playing your rotation exactly as you play it right now".

Why are your anecdotes any more important than anyone else's?

"more important"?

They're proof that the change would cause harm.

Honestly, all you have to do right now is admit "What I, Aravell, want would harm some players, I agree. I think it's worth it, though, for <insert reasons>." The issue I have with you is the adamant rejection of reality. You don't want to admit your proposal WOULD hurt people, and it would. You can try to explain it away, but it absolutely would, and my examples are the proof of it. That's why they're relevant.

If someone proposes a theory to explain something, and others find even a single case where it doesn't hold, then that cannot be the correct model. It didn't take millions of examples opposing Newtonian Mechanics to prove it was wrong, it only took one.

As to the latter:

You say you should be "rewarded for doing more work", which REQUIRES that other people do worse than you who are not. That is your position, is it not? That is a REQUIREMENT of the idea of having a high skill ceiling vs skill floor gap in performance - 20%, wasn't it? Further, people WOULDN'T be clearing content. That's what I've told you and you just ignore it.

"skill ceiling should be higher and mastery should be rewarded (with a 20% performance boost)" IS saying "other people who do not do this should do worse than me, and if it is sufficient to prevent clearing content, then they should not clear content".

The difference is, I fill all my dead GCDs with damage spells, meaning I'm not a Sylphie by definition - "I won't do any damage to anything, I only heal". On the other hand, an elitist is generally defined as one who believes that other people who do not do what they do should not perform at their level, they should be rewarded with performance and clears and gear and so on exclusive to people who perform at their level. The only difference between you and a hyper-elitist is they don't want anyone to even clear the content whereas your position is you think people can still clear (Extremes) with an all gray party, despite that being factually untrue. Come to think of it, are there any cases of at-level Extremes being cleared by parties where every member has a 0? Probably not. However, you do hold the position when it comes to "week 1 savage and ultimates".

So you actually DO meet the definition based on your stated positions. You can lie about me, but I objectively do not meet the definition of Sylphie, so that makes it a lie and an insult. You do meet the definition of elitist within tolerable limits, with the only distinction being you refuse to admit the reality of what your changes would do.

I'm not here to call you names anyway, so I'm not going to persist in this tangential stupidity, only say this:

You are refusing to admit reality. The reality is, your changes WOULD hurt people unless content was balanced around the bottom end of the spectrum we're talking about (not we're not talking Cure spammers or even Glare spammers; we're talking people who use Glare, Dia, Misery, Assize, and PoM in the way that is optimal today; and people that don't even do that perfectly can still get clears, so it would actually need to be balanced LOWER than this to not impact anyone), which accounts for an ~25% of a DPSer increase in overall party damage for a party with 2 healers operating optimally under the proposed changes, making high end players able to trivially clear content.

Admit it, or don't, I don't care. But your plan WOULD hurt people OR leave high end players bored with bosses falling over like tissue paper, neither of which is good for the game.

I find really funny that discussion arises for healers when asked to put a fraction of the effort that tanks and dps are required to clear any content with enrage.

No, that's not why "discussion arises". It's when people who want engaging HEALING content where they HEAL people are told "Sorry, best I can do is more damage buttons making you a SMN-lite".

This isn't about "making it so that others can clear content but I can", it's about making it more fun for everyone.

I mean, that's what I've proposed - something that makes it more fun for (nearly) everyone.

The reason I put in "(nearly)" is because no system makes it fun for EVERYone. Giving all the healers more complex DPS kits would NOT make it more fun for everyone. It would make it more fun for people that want more complex DPS kits. It wouldn't make it more fun for people that want more challenging healing. It wouldn't make it more fun for people that are ambivalent. Overstating things like this is part of the problem.

On the other hand, the 4 Healers Model WOULD make it more fun for everyone other than the people who don't want people who don't play like them to stand even with them on the field of battle, or who want to force everyone to play their way, or the people that might like a SPECIFIC healer's aesthetic but not their playstyle (but this happens no matter what if you make their kits different from each other, and it's happening right now anyway, so that's an acceptable loss since there's literally no way TO avoid it).

...but it's the closest idea to one that DOES make everyone happy and make it more fun for everyone.

On the other hand, "more dps complexity" DOES NOT make it more fun for EVERYone. It ONLY makes it more fun for the people that want a more complex DPS kit.

The argument IS NEVER "design healing around the lowest common denominator of players". That's the lie.

The argument IS "design healing for people that enjoy HEALING and want to do more of it, and split the healer kits so that there is something for those who want more DPS buttons (like SB SCH) and for those who do not (like EW WHM)". THAT is the discussion. It's not about "infantilizing" things. It's about having things for different people who enjoy different things.

That's all it's ever about, despite people always trying to make it about "making it dumb where everyone hates it vs making it awesome where everyone loves it", which is a lie on both ends; no one's arguing to make healing where you have only one button (not "one damage button", I mean ONLY one button or ANYTHING close to that), nor is the other end making it fun for everyone/where everyone loves it; it's making it where people that specifically want more DPS buttons love it and screw everyone else.

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And I think that's it for me for now. o7

[Aravell]

Snip

You are stretching so far to consider me an elitist, so I will stretch the same distance for you, Sylphie. But since you insist, I will call you by a different label, Mr. I don't want to do more work for maximum performance. I'm only being as mean to you as you are to me, it's only because you so desperately want me to fit your label while completely ignoring that I'm not part of this elite and also made sure everyone would still be able to clear, I did the math, that you deny the factual math is not my problem.

You claim you're not here to call me names, yet you're still pushing the point, I asked you to retract the label because it doesn't fit and you stretch the label to try and fit me anyway, and you wonder why you keep getting into fights with people, but I guess it's fine when you hit people with labels and insult them directly but it's suddenly too much when people do it to you. Don't dish it out if you can't take it, sir.

[A reminder that I'm proposing a 10-20% gap between current ceiling and new ceiling, reminder that 10% is around 600 dps and that 600 dps is barely 1% of the amount required for the dps check of the first floor of savage, reminder that you are arguing against healers doing 1% less to the boss HP bar.]

Also nice goalpost move from "people who are doing the same rotation now won't be able to clear extremes" to "full party of 0 logs can no longer clear extremes". You're just refusing to admit the reality that what you're describing doesn't happen enough to be an actual problem. You are refusing to admit that a good player will balance out a bad player and make it no longer an issue. You are trying to argue that if my proposed changes happen, people will suddenly become bad players and that's frankly ridiculous. But I'm done with this, you won't admit you're wrong while telling me I won't admit I'm wrong, even though I have math to backup my assertions and you have no data except anecdotes.

One more thing, you keep asserting that I don't care for casuals. You actually know nothing. I happen to have a very close casual friend and I made sure he wouldn't be harmed by the changes I propose. Do you have any hardcore friends to ask them if your proposed changes would be liked by them?

EDIT: Funny thought, if there is no clear log of a full team of 0s, then that already immediately defeats your argument that everything has to be tuned to the lowest output, because it currently isn't tuned to the lowest, because a full party at the lowest cannot clear.

[Sebazy]

To be fair, what determines someone's fun IS opinion/preference, is it not? So when advocating for designs to be fun (to the person), that's the only thing that actually IS relevant in the end: Is it fun (for them) to play or isn't it.

They can't think that highly of the role's fun factor given that they barely play it

It's a time old classic post and IMO you're reading far too much into it. These comments generally boil down to 'make healers impossible to mess up on so I never have to worry about them letting me die'. It has nothing to do with actual fun outside of their own on an entirely different role. FFXIV has this wild and wacky aversion to failure at any level of content remember.

Same problem. Balance for the middle and the lower half that can clear content now no longer will be able to, thus leading to them being harmed/bothered.

It doesn't work unless you balance to the bottom.

In my humble opinion, this is only an issue because SE have brought it on themselves precisely by balancing to the absolute bottom for years now. ARR on release was impeccably tuned and balanced and had a fantastic difficulty curve that steadily ramped up from AV, through the expert dungeons, into HM primals and onto Coil, even Alliance sat neatly in line. In essence, ARR had midcore content because it had a smooth curve that lead up out from leveling dungeons and into the endgame.

It was very possible to wipe in an expert dungeon, never mind a HM primal, people got used to it and as such, it was less of a problem, more people were happier to dust themselves off and put a bit more effort in. You saw that going into Titan HM where people would pool together huge shells that could field multiple teams capable of clearing it all night long to help those that were struggling (I refuse to believe that Ragnarok was alone on this, I had like 4 full linkshells and people were still had to be asked to leave once they had all their weapons and weren't up for helping others to make more room).

Now we're in this weird state where it's actually kind of challenging to wipe outside of Extremes but on the rare occasion that it does happen, people lose their minds.

I'm not saying that we need to return to the days of FFXI, but you yourself have commented that we have no midcore content so you're clearly aware of that problem. Where is that midcore content? It vanished into the casual mire when it all got tuned to the bottom of course.

If we want midcore content, the difficulty has to start somewhere, it doesn't need to be a steep curve and it certainly doesn't want to be a wall. It just needs to be a ramp that starts from somewhere like Alliance and needs to be tuned just a little above the bottom to wake people up and get them watching their screens again.

[Renathras]

It's a time old classic post and IMO you're reading far too much into it. These comments generally boil down to 'make healers impossible to mess up on so I never have to worry about them letting me die'. It has nothing to do with actual fun outside of their own on an entirely different role. FFXIV has this wild and wacky aversion to failure at any level of content remember.

It really isn't this, though. Have you see this thread: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...mplex-DPS-kits

You posted in it, but have you followed the discussion?

A lot of those people aren't posting in this thread - I can't really blame them - but are healer players talking about how they don't want complex DPS kits, they want to do more healing. Many of them seem not to want any more healing buttons at all (another coin in the "Ren isn't alone" bucket). None of them are arguing for healing to be braindead. Quite the opposite, they want healing to be the part that is challenging.

I know your opinion there - but novice healers won't be able to clear 4 mans - yet this is what a lot of healer players want. Besides, we can keep 4 mans as braindead as they are now, "but we'll be bored"; you'll get over it, there are other ways of grinding tomes. Regardless, it's clear there's a hunger for healing kits to be what are more interesting, not damage kits, and for encounter design to be changed. A lot of people there are saying what I do all the time, that the solution has to involve encounter design changing and giving people more opportunities to heal.

Feel free to tell them they're wrong, I guess.

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As for the balance argument:

Who are you arguing against, me or Aravell?

It's not "balancing to the absolute bottom", it's "Can people clear the content right now? For all the people that answer is 'Yes' for, post-change, those people should be able to clear content playing the way they do today. This ensures no one is being 'hurt' and that the change is not only net positive but ONLY positive having not cost or drawbacks to consider or weigh or make allowance for". If at any point that statement becomes untrue, then that means there is actually a cost to the proposed change, and that cost must be addressed.

Again, some people felt bad FOR SCH players who lost their damage kits in ShB. And SMNs in EW. Those changes shouldn't have happened. Doing the opposite here would be just as harmful.

EDIT:

Also, the midcore content isn't gone because it became casual.

The midcore content is gone because it became hardcore (or was removed).

Bozja/Eureka were removed, Extremes became Savages. The midcore content is gone because it was substituted for more hardcore content, not because it became casual content. The way to get midcore content back would actually be to make Extremes easier (specifically, less body checks), probably make the first boss Savage fights easier (and the third harder, to provide a better gradient into the fourth), and to return content like Bozja/Eureka to the game, complete with their varied dungeon difficult and crazy mechanic FATEs from Bozja.

[Zairava]

It really isn't this, though. Have you see this thread: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...mplex-DPS-kits

You posted in it, but have you followed the discussion?

A lot of those people aren't posting in this thread - I can't really blame them - but are healer players talking about how they don't want complex DPS kits, they want to do more healing. Many of them seem not to want any more healing buttons at all (another coin in the "Ren isn't alone" bucket). None of them are arguing for healing to be braindead. Quite the opposite, they want healing to be the part that is challenging.

I know your opinion there - but novice healers won't be able to clear 4 mans - yet this is what a lot of healer players want. Besides, we can keep 4 mans as braindead as they are now, "but we'll be bored"; you'll get over it, there are other ways of grinding tomes. Regardless, it's clear there's a hunger for healing kits to be what are more interesting, not damage kits, and for encounter design to be changed. A lot of people there are saying what I do all the time, that the solution has to involve encounter design changing and giving people more opportunities to heal.

Feel free to tell them they're wrong, I guess.

Care to explain how they won't be able to handle a couple more dps buttons to make the healing downtime there will always inevitably be more entertaining then? How they won't get over that, despite still being able to glare/broil/etc. spam and ignore the rest if they so chose? Even in EX healbots can be carried doing almost no dps at all by a competent group.

It's not "balancing to the absolute bottom", it's "Can people clear the content right now? For all the people that answer is 'Yes' for, post-change, those people should be able to clear content playing the way they do today. This ensures no one is being 'hurt' and that the change is not only net positive but ONLY positive having not cost or drawbacks to consider or weigh or make allowance for". If at any point that statement becomes untrue, then that means there is actually a cost to the proposed change, and that cost must be addressed.

They will still be able to clear normal mode content just fine even if the healing was more demanding like it was in the past (which, ironically, was also the period they handled more dps tools). There's also the matter of the overwhelming amount of time spent using glare/broil/etc even inside the high-end content. I also hold the belief that healers currently have too many tools at their disposal. Especially in groups with two of them, it's honestly a detriment how hard they can trivialize any incoming damage.

I will repeat what I ever will say. Stormblood was the time period they hit that perfect middle ground.

[Zairava]

They WON'T be able to.

That was the point.

Well, sorta - that wasn't even the argument. The argument HAS NEVER BEEN "someone just hitting glare over and over again". At any point. "Refreshing Dia, using PoM on CD or with party buffs, using Misery under buff windows, using Assize on CD unless small delays can be used to improve healing" is not "someone just hitting glare over and over again" and never has been.

And as I say, there are cases where healers, doing that currently optimal stuff, have barely made it through an enrage because PF be like that sometimes.

It's not hard to explain at all, and I have explained it. Rejecting the explanation doesn't make it cease to exist. And no one can explain something to you when your refuse to listen.

Bro, my dude.

The amount of dps needed to meet enrage is down to balancing and whether or not too many people made mistakes and died. Not because joe blow decided to not press Dia at exactly the 5 minute and 43 second mark to get .017% more dps.

Assize is on a 40 second cooldown and is an oGCD, the DoT is 30s long and you only need to worry about refreshing it outside that if you're going for fractional increase in dps. If these are your ideas of "shaking up the boredom of having one single GCD spellcast to use ad nauseam" then that is as barebones as barebones gets.

For someone who repeatedly babbles on how "people aren't listening" you sure didn't listen to when I said I'm a below average healer who is bored by how they are currently structured and would like to be more engaged.

"normal mode content"?

This discussion has never been about "normal mode content", either, now has it?

Have you actually read any of the posts you're replying to?

Yes, have you?

Care to explain how they won't be able to handle a couple more dps buttons to make the healing downtime there will always inevitably be more entertaining then? How they won't get over that, despite still being able to glare/broil/etc. spam and ignore the rest if they so chose? Even in EX healbots can be carried doing almost no dps at all by a competent group.

They will still be able to clear normal mode content just fine even if the healing was more demanding like it was in the past (which, ironically, was also the period they handled more dps tools). There's also the matter of the overwhelming amount of time spent using glare/broil/etc even inside the high-end content.

Regardless, it doesn't discredit what I'm saying.

That being said, let's take normal mode out of the equation.

The only players interacting with the amount of dps to matter are the players already doing savage and above content, of which are the players most interested in optimization the everliving piss out of their job or role. So why in the hell would it matter for the players that don't? And outside of week 1 and 2 progression, it begins getting easier to clear these dps checks due to power creep, of which healer dps can be carried.

Alternatively, have you read this thread? -> https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...mplex-DPS-kits

You should.

Yes, and you should read my reply to it where I said I don't think either need to be overly complicated.

[Sebazy]

Quite the opposite, they want healing to be the part that is challenging.

Ok cool yep, I'd be more than happy for some of that. I don't think it entirely solves the issue of healers being boring in mundane content but absolutely, bring on the challenging healing requirements as far as I'm concerned....

I know your opinion there - but novice healers won't be able to clear 4 mans - yet this is what a lot of healer players want.

Oh right.... I think you've completely misunderstood my point that I'm trying to make. Here goes one more time, if you fail to understand it then so be it, that's a you problem.

Look at a boss like Cagnazzo, he hits hard enough to kill people that are caught napping. Not a significant wipe threat, but dangerous enough that you can't sleep on him like some bosses.

Let's take his most damaging sequence: Over the course of a minute and a half, he dealt 4 hits to me totalling slightly under 72k. How much HP did I have in this dungeon as a DNC? Oh... 72k....

Now granted, that run had a Sadge, so lets recalculate on the assumption that I'm the WHM and not a single mitigation button was pressed by the entire team. That nets us roughly 100k damage taken over the same minute and a half window, lets go with my WHM having 65k hp, so I need to do 35k healing to pass the heal check.

1 single Medica II cast + the hot running it's full duration is ~25k HP per person. Therefore 2 Medica IIs over a 90 second period aka 30% uptime would *comfortably* get us through this damage window. The biggest damage window in the fight. 30% uptime on a level 50 GCD PBAOE with a 20yalm reach and a 15 second duration. On a dungeon boss that's far from the most braindead out there. Think about that for a moment.....

This is a fight that is decidedly middle of the road as far as current dungeon bosses go and 1 cast every 15 seconds of a level 50 GCD spell has it covered with room to spare.

Thus my point ISNT that we can't raise the healing requirements because we absolutely can, people survived stuff like the old Demon Wall bosses and Bardams, they'll survive higher healing requirements than we have now.

Rather my point is: I don't think these people actually realise how comically vast a gap we have between what mainstream content expects of healers and what our current healing kits are actually capable of.

If we increase Cagnazzo's healing requirements by 50% that basically has it breaking even with rolled Medica IIs assuming no mitigation or cooldowns are used. How far do you think we have to go to actually push what's on tap once we start dipping into Lilies, cooldowns and multipliers like Temperance, PI, Asylum, let alone powerhouse CDs like Lilybell? If you're unsure, it's basically Harrowing Hell Savage minus the positioning/movement. That's literally what it takes to make healing genuinely challenging now.

I'm absolutely down for that coming to mainstream content.

Of course, this still doesn't solve the tedium when doing more casual or solo content now does it? Or should that force us to dip into our cooldowns too?

Feel free to tell them they're wrong, I guess.

I guess I just did.

For all the people that answer is 'Yes' for, post-change, those people should be able to clear content playing the way they do today.

I can clear an alliance raid today without barely looking at my screen. Make of that what you will.

Again, some people felt bad FOR SCH players who lost their damage kits in ShB. And SMNs in EW. Those changes shouldn't have happened. Doing the opposite here would be just as harmful.

No it wouldn't, and because I'm not you, I'll even explain why:

Because SHB took away a substantial facet of the job and replaced it with nothing. That is harmful. We can both agree on that right?

You suggest that adding damage complexity would somehow be just as harmful. What are you basing this conclusion on? Are you forgetting that we have actual prior examples of this to go on?

Remember Cleric Stance? Many didn't like it or never clicked with it's risk vs reward and as such, they simply chose not to use it. Say what you will about the eventual drama, but the fact remains that a very sizeable chunk of healers simply chose not to engage with that portion of their kit despite the fact that it dropped their damage contribution to the group not by 1%, not by 3%, not even by 10%, but by something like 90% or more depending on the timeframe.

More relevantly, until Gordias Savage landed and pushed the importance of DPS as a metric upon the community, people generally didn't care all that much. It wasn't a problem. If a ~90% drop in damage contribution wasn't a problem back then, why would a ~10-20% damage drop for not engaging with the new mechanics be an issue now? It's absolutely not going to stop them from clearing anything that they couldn't already given that once people stop dying to mechanics, modern extremes are usually getting cleared with minutes left on the enrage timer.

EDIT:

Also, the midcore content isn't gone because it became casual.

The midcore content is gone because it became hardcore (or was removed).

Serious question, did you do Crystal Tower on it's release? Or Lighthouse?