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

[ForsakenRoe]

As many others say, 'just more healing' or 'just more damage' is not going to solve much. Rather than 'increase healing required by 100%' or 'give us 5 more damage buttons in our rotation', it'd probably have more lasting power to go with say, 40% increased healing and 2-3 more damage buttons. I've long advocated for more damage buttons now, earlier, to create a foundational kit to build off of for if/when they decide to increase healing, because overhauling the entire healing requirements landscape will take time, and leaving the role to languish in it's current state with nothing but a 'yeh we are working on it' is not going to help in the short-medium term. Even if damage buttons are nothing more than a bandaid fix on a bullet wound, it's still better than no treatment at all, surely? And if it buys time to get a 'proper fix' more solidly done, better balanced, rather than a rushed job that is broken at launch and means people can't clear content (eg cannot pump enough HPS in an ultimate), then I think it should be a no-brainer to do said bandaid fix. I can see why some people would be against it though: SE might see 'ah, healers have stopped complaining for now, clearly the bandaid fix was enough to sate them' and then leave it at that, without doing the main portion of the fixing, the healing requirements changes. Now why would anyone believe that SE would half-arse a healer role change /s

I think we could stand to have more interaction between our damage and healing kits, like how Lilies give us a damage button by using our heals, I think we could have a healing button we get access to by using our damage. SGE could have done it with Kardia, but SE wussed out and gave us 'the old Embrace Macro'. Additionally, we have to consider just how much 'more healing' some are asking for. 80% of our GCDs on healing (as some are asking for here) has been discussed on the healer section of the forums. You don't even reach that in J-Waves in TEA, an Ultimate encounter. It would be like doing Harrowing Hell, but as an entire fight. It is just far too much to keep up on, not just because 'oh player cannot put out that much healing', but because having to deal with that extra damage reduces the amount of spare time available to 'recover' if something goes wrong

The other problem IMO with people advocating for 'only more healing', is that once we get competent at keeping up with the 'more healing', our reward for 'getting good' is the same droll rotation we have now. It doesn't inspire me to practise and improve as a player when that's what would be waiting for me as the 'incentive'. It's like telling tanks that 'if you get more proficient at mitigating damage effectively with your CDs, you get rewarded with extra time to press Maim/RiotBlade'. Nobody cares about Maim, everyone cares about getting extra Fell Cleaves or Primal Rends. Extra Confiteors and Holy Spirits, or Gnashing Fangs and Bloodspillers. People who ask for more DPS buttons on healers mostly ask for parity with the most basic of the tanks, WAR. Even ignoring Heavy Swing and Maim (since their only purpose really is to access Path and Eye), the comparison looks like this:

WAR / WHM

Path / Glare
Eye / Dia
3x Fell Cleave + Primal Rend / 3x Lilies + Misery
Inner Release / POM
Upheaval / Assize

Ok, but what about Infuriate? And it's interaction with Fell Cleave reducing it's CD? In fact, what is the comparison point for Fell Cleave outside of IR? What about Inner Chaos? What about Onslaught? We could compare Mythril Tempest to Holy, but what is the comparison for Decimate, the AOE gauge spender? If we were to have WHM (or any healer) having parity with WAR, it'd need like 3-4 more damage buttons. Personally, though, I don't even necessarily want full parity with WAR, I just want to take the most impactful parts and use those, to maximise engaging gameplay additions while minimizing button count additions. To that end, I'd take the idea of a 0-100 gauge, make it build via any non Lily spell, and spend it on an AOE heal that is GCD, but damage neutral, because we are a healer. Then I'd add 1 (one) 15s CD GCD (call it Banish) that is slightly stronger than Glare but builds gauge faster than Glare does, and reduce Dia down to 12s duration. We'd Dia every 5 GCDs, Banish every 6 GCDs, and Glare when we can't do either, which would look something like this (sorry for the error sounds). I think it's still 'less stuff to manage' than WAR, in terms of 'what we do for our damage GCDs'.

Also, to save on button space, Cure 1 and Medica 1 can upgrade to Cure 2 and Medica 2 at 30 and 50 respectively

I'm not so unsure. They don't have a dedicated healer designer, and I'm genuinely curious- usually when a new role is created, it's featured as the face of the expansion. Sometimes it's one, sometimes more than one at a time- but has it ever been a healer? Because I really doubt it, and I believe that it is because the role takes just that place in Square's minds.

It has never been a healer, and likely never will be. It's never been a caster either. I think they find it easier to animate a melee/tank in a trailer in such a way that gets people more excited than a caster would. Calling it now, next expansion he'll be a MCH (since Thancred is a GNB, he can't double up on that). NIN could be an option too, but dual wield right after Viper? Probably best to give it a gap. It's not like 'healer protagonist in trailer' can't work, Blizzard did a pretty good job of it IMO with Anduin in the BFA trailer. Just have the WOL as an AST, recolour the light dome in that video blue and add some stars to it, job done