Would you rather healers get more complex healing kits or more complex DPS kits?

[Renathras]

Is a wrong statement.

No, it isn't.

You could both two WHM and two SCH heal in ARR, but having one of each was generally better. In HW, SCH could do stupid amounts of damage while also healing, which somewhat broke the system (and started the tend of SCH being meta for every single expansion in the game).

Moreover, the game is not just raids. Never has been. And in every expansion aside from possibly SB (though probably then, too), WHM was the single most played healer Job.

.

Anyway, this is a tangent to a tangent.

People need to stop saying "herp derp always been this way" when people are saying (a) it hasn't (universally) always been this way and (b) that people don't WANT IT to be this way. Saying it's always been this way is rarely a good argument at the best of times, and then getting into fights over it when pointed out that isn't even strictly true doesn't help matters.

The fact is, people don't want it, and there is game history supporting it not being forced on everyone in the past and the game working just fine - arguably better than it does today. You can have whatever last word you want, but the fact remains that GCD healing was the ONLY way WHM healed in ARR because it didn't have oGCD heals. I'll note you have not disputed that fact thus far. Therefore, you can't say it was wrong.

Simple question: Did WHM GCD heal or oGCD heal in ARR?

GCD heal.

And WHMs were prevalent across all kinds of content - including raids but also outside of them - as GCD healers because of this. So it is not "a wrong statement" to point this out.

WHM did not have Lustrate, and had 1 Benediction every 5 minutes. And you weren't going to do all the healing you needed with Stoneskin...partly on account of the fact Stoneskin didn't have any heal component.

If you're asking for SCH to be an oGCD focused healer and WHM to be a GCD focused one, that is what the history of the game supports.

.

EDIT:

Anyway, for my part - I think it's fine to have some of both. That's the point of my argument.

[Doragan]

herp derp always been this way

It has. It literally has always been this way with oGCDs. Where healing mattered, which is raids and EX trials, the first, main, strongest, most spammable, most widely used, was Whispering Dawn. Sure, Adloquinum and Regen were used a lot. They were really strong, for sure, but in itself doesn't make GCDs the focus of healers in ARR, as most of the healing doesn't come from GCDs. You were, and I was, talking about healers in ARR there. And, surprise, in ARR, most of the healing comes from SCH. And where does that healing comes from..? Whispering Dawn. Ok, I hope I don't have to repeat that again.

You can have whatever last word you want, but the fact remains that GCD healing was the ONLY way WHM

I'll note you have not disputed that fact thus far. Therefore, you can't say it was wrong.

I have never argued that WHM, specifically, only used oGCDs to heal in ARR. Of course WHM in ARR is going to use GCDs in dungeons. That doesn't make healing as a whole in ARR GCD focused.
However, in any place where healing matters, which is EX trials, and Raids, the main and strongest by far, way to heal has historically been double buffed Whispering Dawn. Which is an oGCD.

It's perfectly ok to be wrong.
However, please go put back that goalpost where you found it, and keep it there.

[Renathras]

(Spoiler, you've pretty much achieved just that on SCH on the very first log I clicked on, a Halone kill if you're curious).

I think that's the closest thing to a complement you've ever said to me. ^_^
(I don't EXACTLY suck at this game just because I don't like to focus on DPS rotations, I just prefer focusing on other things...)

Okay, so let me explain in more detail what I don't like about it and then maybe you can consider it from that angle?

First, I just really hated Cleric Stance. So anything using that name I'm going to already have points against. While I admit that's a bit irrational, I'm Human, so I'm irrational sometimes. More to the point, so are a lot of other people. So that's relevant. Not to mention the name itself doesn't fit a lot of Jobs. "Cleric" stance doesn't make sense for, for example, a medical doctor-wizard like SGE, and never did for SCH (we just ignored that at the time because it was the nature of the Cross-Classing beast). To this day, people complain about Esuna since that's a WHM spell, and SCH and AST had different names for the same ability (and we STILL DO for Raises), so why not our cleanses as well? Setting that aside...

Second, I don't like how this just doubles down on the oGCD system. You've seen what I've said about ARR WHM. While you disagree on the damage dealt and stance dancing, can we at least agree that WHM DID function by GCD healing at the time since it didn't have a lot of non-GCD healing? Someone mentioned Stoneskin as ignoring Cleric, but Stoneskin was a GCD (and one of those weird ones with a longer than 2.5 sec cast originally, I think? It's been ages...but I think it was 3 sec. I feel like there was some trait or something at some point to lower it?) Point being, that style was represented well even in ARR. It even KIND of is now: WHM's highest priority heals to use are Solace and Rapture, which are on the GCD (even if they're "oGCDs in a trenchcoat"). One of the amazing things they did with WHM in ShB was retain the GCD "feel" of it despite giving it what are EFFECTIVELY (though less so when Misery wasn't damage neutral) oGCDs, keeping its general play cadence (GCDs) in terms of APM and the like.

...I guess my point here is, while SCH played as an oGCD weaving healer from the start in ARR, WHM...didn't. I'm one of the people that don't really like it. Been dabbling with AST some lately, and no matter how much I try to like it, I REALLY don't like that much oGCD weaving. I've always liked oGCDs that augment GCDs. It's why I like Recitation, Deployment Tactics, and Emergency Tactics on SCH, or Zoe or Plenary on SGE and WHM. I honestly like some of the things like that which AST has, like Horoscope (basically a delayed "Use Medica 1/2 now, get one free later!" type of deal) and Neutral Sect ("20 seconds of Eukrasia! Turn YOUR Helios and Benefic into Succor and Adlo today!"), but I don't like oGCDs that entirely replace healing, nor a playstyle which is chiefly about DPS rotation with some token oGCD healing weaves at scripted times. As I've said, I don't have a problem with some healer Jobs working like this, but I want to be able to get away from it. This would just be another way of forcing that sort of gameplay on all healers, and I think we've established I'm not the only one that wouldn't care for it.

Third, the fizzle mechanic is replicating one of the worst things about old Cleric Stance: That it hurts new or inexperienced healers. Who is most likely to think "Oh! Tank/party need healing now! GCD Goooo?! WHY ISN'T MY HEAL GOING OFF?!?! /panic", do you figure? Brand new or inexperienced healers. The "fizzle" preventing that one GCD is going to be the culprit here. That 1 sec wouldn't really bother an experienced player...but MOST experienced players aren't going to fizzle in the first place outside of being sleepy or drunk (i.e. it will happen, but not much). Moderately experienced players will see it somewhat more often, but roll with it. Who is it going to hurt the most? The inexperienced who are still prone to panicking. The very people old Cleric hurt the most which was part of the reason it got removed before.

Any "new Cleric stance" should be designed in the opposite way, where it's more lenient on people messing up and less on those who are highly skilled. I'm not sure how to do this, though. Perhaps instead of fizzling, doubles the strength of the heal but then locks you out of reactivating Cleric for 10 sec, maybe? That would mean people most prone to panic healing would actually be better off while the hardcore raider half asleep from 5 hours of prog smacks themselves in the forehead since they're now going to fail a DPS check or get a 95 instead of 99 parse. I dunno. I'm not proposing that as a solution, I'm just saying that was part of why old Cleric was removed - the punishment mechanism most hurt people on the low end, and this does the same. To not share old Cleric's fate, you'd have to address it and design it to do the opposite. Indeed, that not-a-proposal I just did is actually good not just because it gets that balance right, but it MIGHT even be used INTENTIONALLY by skilled healers in some cases (e.g. someone wants to make a REALLY powerful party shield and so intentionally breaks Cleric to do so). In other words, lower skill floor, higher skill ceiling. Something that...well, some people have asked for in the past, yes?

Fourth, in practice, with oGCD healing as it is today, how would you prevent this from just being "turn on Cleric and do all your healing through oGCDs", which is the very problem we have today? This just sounds like how everyone but WHM is already healing most content. As you point out, that Halone run (if I remember right, a few party members were prone to getting hit by things, hence the 4 Adlos since my spot healing oGCDs were on CD), it might have been possible for me to ignore GCD heals entirely. In that sense, I could have just turned Cleric on at the start and never touched it for the whole encounter. So how is this adding anything in terms of skill expression or dynamic/complexity to the kit if it's as fire and forget (or even moreso) than Tank Stance/Kardia/Dance Parner for 3 out of 4 healer Jobs?

...is that a bit meatier for you to contemplate?

I hope Cleric Stance stays in bin where it should stay. It was clunky and useless, you want to deal dps, you put it on, you want to heal, you take it off, why does anyone want to do this? As Ren said, it divided the community, I remember alot of toxic comments were directed towards healers. I dont want to see it come back and I doubt the developers want it back aswell.

Complex DPS isnt the answer either, we are healers, we should heal. If the encounters requires us to deal damage, because the party is not losing enough of HP, then the encounters need the be changed. An Ideal encounter has us do 80% healing and 20% DPS, now its the other way around. They could start by nerfing OGCD spells, our GCD spells are useless with how good our OGCD spells are.

Make healing to difficult and those with lower skill will abandon the role which inturn means longer queue to wait for healers, make it too easy and we get forum threads like this one. Square cant win.

Agreed with pretty much all of this.

My thing is, GCD heals are almost not used, but there are some interesting things in there, and there could be MORE. Regens/HoTs in most MMOs present an interesting option of "Do I need a lot of healing how at higher cost (Cure 2), or is the situation less urgent such that the healing can come in over time at a more efficient cost (Regen)? Or is it small enough that I can get away with a quicker, but smaller, and more efficient heal (Cure 1)?" Back in the day, we had Stoneskin as a cast time barrier. Now we have Stoneskin as an oGCD that we weave between other GCDs at no cost which has a 30 sec CD and 2 charges (Divine Benison) meaning it's up practically all the time anyway for free.

A lot of oGCDs might be interesting if they WERE GCDs and considered thinking about when to use them or how to fit them into your rotation.

But, on the flip-side, for all people don't want to touch them, GCD heals are...pretty powerful. Many/most of the AOE oGCD heals are 300-400 potency, which is equal to a Medica 1. But because those oGCDs exist, Medica 1...practically doesn't. On the other hand, if they were weaker or more augment type abilities (like Plenary), then they could be used by skilled healers to reduce the amount of GCDs they needed to heal SOME (but not as much as now), but wouldn't hurt low end healers much, since they could just spam Medica 1. Imagine, for example, if Medica 1 was reduced to a 300 potency heal (from 400), but cost 500 MP (from 900). Now a person COULD sustain a party by using it instead of needing to weave in oGCD healing. Bringing in oGCDs could reduce the amount you'd need, allowing skilled players to cast Glare more, but it wouldn't be causing low end players to drop left and right since their backstop would still be entirely functional (and moreso than now).

"But then we get back to the high end players being bored"; well, as I said, not as much as now, since encounter design having more frequent healing needs would also come into play. Less big spikes, more frequent smaller damage. A low skilled player addresses the problem with Medica 1. A high skilled player might address it with Plenary + Medica 2, timing the Medica 2 to go off before the second hit and so healing every pair of them together. Both would be able to clear the content, while the high end player would simply be a bit more efficient at it, but still breaking up their Glarespam more frequently. Add to that that little thing called "autoattacks can crit on Tanks" (Extreme and up only) and "bosses don't stop autoattacking while casting/readying spells" (pretty much all content other than maybe solo encounters), and you have a lot more to do as a healer, whether low or high skilled.

That seems a more reasonable overall solution.

It has. It literally has always been this way with oGCDs.

Okay, again:

Did WHM GCD heal or oGCD heal in ARR?

.

Personally, I'm a WHM player because I like its healing style better. I started as CNJ. I healed stuff on WHM for all of ARR and HW. I leveled SCH and dabbled in it in both, but didn't do nearly as much and didn't really understand its full kit until SB. I definitely healed stuff when I ran it on WHM. And I did do some raiding (I got dragged into First Coil with an FC group and cleared the whole thing wearing a mix of artifact and CT gear). A lot of old videos show a lot of WHMs doing a lot of healing with GCDs. You can say they were doign it wrong...but it was pretty normal and common at the time.

Double buffed Whispering Dawn is great... but isn't up all the time, and isn't a spot healing tool for Tanks taking auto-attack crits.

To keep saying someone's wrong when you're arguing about a different thing than them and they've clarified what they're talking about isn't an argument, in any case. But let me try to do so once more:

My position:

SCH was always an oGCD focused healer, WHM was a GCD focused healer. In ARR, both co-existed side by side, and people that liked GCD healing played WHM and those that liked oGCD healing played SCH. And both were welcome in this shared space of the game, and fully functional in content.

Is that statement wrong?

The OPTION was there, so both groups felt addressed and had a place in the game. The only thing WHM needed to be as viable as SCH in everything is, ironically, still true today - WHM still has very little party mitigation, and as I'm fond of saying, has EVEN LESS THAN Black Mage when the boss is targetable (Addle ever 90 sec for 20% against magic raidwides vs Temperance every 120 sec for 20% against magic [and physical, but those are more rare] raidwides). Pro-Shell as a GCD with a 1 min CD or as an oGCD effect added to Plenary or even Asylum would shore that up pretty easily.

EVEN TODAY, the Devs managed to keep WHM as a somewhat GCD focused healer with Lilies doing a not insignificant portion of its healing and (owing to being a potential damage gain with Misery under burst) encouraged as some of its most high priority healing abilities. I don't think it's fair to tell people that enjoyed that kind of healing, which was both prevalent AND viable, that it never happened. Because it DID happen. And even if it did not (though let's be clear, it DID), that wouldn't change that they enjoy GCD healing and want more of that, not all healers to become DPSers with an oGCD only healing set.

The goalpost is here. I'm not moving it...

.

.

Overall, I think something like this is what the role/game needs:

The way to make healing more heal focused would be to have more frequent but smaller damage AND have weaker potency heals. If damage output was what it is now but normalized (for example, instead of a single hit for 75% of the party's health every 30 sec and nothing in between, 3x 30% attacks every 10 seconds) while also cutting GCD heal potencies by 50% and oGCD healing potencies by 50-75% (such that they do either 50% or 25% of what they do now). Tetra would heal in the ballpark of a Cure 1, not a Cure 2, for example. For the oGCD focused healers (that is, the ones designed to heal primarily through oGCDs), you simply cut them all by 50%. For the ones designed to work through GCD healing, the oGCDs would be cut by 25%. Exceptions to this rule would be limited and mainly be big emergency heals (e.g. Benediction).

The more frequent healing means oGCDs will be on CD so you can't solve ALL of those with oGCDs. They would need to be more strategically used to get more benefits. For example, using Horoscope or Plenary just before a second strike along with a GCD heal to heal the damage from the first and then let the HoT (Medica 2) or Horoscope Helios (AST) cover the second. This would also make abilities like old Divine Seal (increases potency of healing) or current Temperance/Asylum have more value. Right now, most +20% healing is just contributing to overhealing, but if our heals were half as strong, it would be useful for "HP to 1 Doom" style healing checks (which would also have slightly longer duration than they do now) as well as for a more triage style of healing letting you eek out more efficiencies.

Meanwhile, as I said above, it wouldn't really hurt novice healers if they could fall back on 300 potency, 500 MP cost Medica 1 spam to get them through hairy situations. They'd just be less efficient, but entirely capable of clearing normal/MSQ/etc content.

So such a solution doesn't really hurt anyone, and would make healing more interesting and engaging, while also making it less DPS focused. (Granted, that might be considered hurting the people that "I don't wanna heal, I just wanna DPS!", but the oGCD focused healer Jobs would still accommodate them.)

[Sebazy]

I think that's the closest thing to a complement you've ever said to me. ^_^
(I don't EXACTLY suck at this game just because I don't like to focus on DPS rotations, I just prefer focusing on other things...)

Believe it or not, I don't s**t talk people for the sake of it, your play in main stream content is at a perfectly decent level, well above average primarily thanks to a solid active rate. Being prone to bad takes doesn't make one a bad player

Okay, so let me explain in more detail what I don't like about it and then maybe you can consider it from that angle?

That's at least giving some meat behind your thoughts yeah, perfectly fair and much more reasonable than just 'ugh no, cleric stance bad'.

I can't say I agree with all of your rationale: Eg a bad weave is a potential 0.6 second delay and you don't see sprout healers losing sleep over that, most likely don't even realise until it's pointed out to them given how badly the game itself explains that. My personal opinion is that you're over estimating how impactful fizzling would be. Roe dropped a neat suggestion for circumventing that in the healing board version but in my eyes I think the 1 second GCD stall is impactful enough that you'd feel it, but the likelihood of it ever causing any actual issue is nigh non existent.

Fourth, in practice, with oGCD healing as it is today, how would you prevent this from just being "turn on Cleric and do all your healing through oGCDs", which is the very problem we have today?

This is the actual correct answer and the main flaw with the concept as is. Congrats even if I had already spelt it out.

Regarding your debate with Doragan:

I'll give you a little insight that clarify what I suspect Doragan is trying to explain to you. Basically, a team tackling the likes of Coil or Savage would think of the two healers kits as one combined unit. When he is saying that oGCD healing was the priority, what he is saying is that you would try to cover things with Whispering Dawn as much as possible (And it could handle a lot), you didn't want to dip into the Medica II pot if you could avoid it because of how MP constrained WHM was, making them needlessly burn MP on aoe healing would at best force your bard to spend more time singing ballad or have them chugging ethers and thus not being able to click PPPs, and at worst could risk a wipe if they were running short enough to not be able to raise or burst heal at a key moment.

Sure, in isolation WHM certainly wasn't an oGCD focused healer early on, but as part of a team you absolutely focused on oGCDs first, and yes, that stands true even well before the days of using oGCDs to funnel more GCDs into DPS. Instead you used oGCDs as an opportunity to not need to cast anything and conserve MP

As for how mighty WD was, don't sleep on it. Watch some of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qq2pGaIx2E

If you watch casts for the first half of the fight, it looks like the SCH is absolutely chadding that poor AST no? The AST's carrying the healing whilst that SCH is sat in cleric DPSing away for big chunks of the time right?

https://www.fflogs.com/reports/NpkFz...ayermetric=hps

Except that wasn't the case, they actually had pretty even healing throughput. WD was always wildly under appreciated and uptime issues overplayed because most people ran the fairy on auto pilot and the 'AI' did a pretty terrible job of getting value out of it.

I digress, I'll leave this train at that to avoid derailing an otherwise interesting thread more than I already have.

[Renathras]

This is the actual correct answer and the main flaw with the concept as is.

Mh.

Regarding your debate with Doragan:

If that's what he means.

But the point still stands that we had a healer Job for people who did not oGCD heal, and likewise, that both kits were fully functional and synergistic.

And, of course, it doesn't really change what people are asking for in any case.