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

[ChrysOCE]

"why should I take a DPS loss when you make a mistake?".

That's half the problem, isn't it? DPS loss should really be a consideration for DPS jobs?

[VerdeLuck]

That's half the problem, isn't it? DPS loss should really be a consideration for DPS jobs?

Outside of normal mode content, parses are everything in this game. There is no avoiding the fact that healers will always be judged on their skill by how much damage they can put out while meeting the bare minimum healing needs.
making you choose between healing and damage just makes that worse and adds more friction between players. Healers would be expected to sacrifice their parses to save runs and save others' parses, which is going to cause toxicity.

[PyurBlue]

Instead of oGCDs being "I can use this on this mechanic to save myself GCDing here or save my cohealer a resource for the next one" it's just "I use this here because this mechanic was designed for me to press it and I have nothing better to use it for"

I think that's bound to happen in scripted fights. It's why I want SE to move away from them so much. If not in general, then make content that's specifically designed to be dynamic and can't simply be memorized. Variant dungeons went halfway there and I feel like they're much better than normal dungeons as a result.

[Katish]

The statement that you quoted seems to be a real fear/paranoia of his "How many posters in this thread have said that ONLY healer DPS kits need to be changed and everything else is fine? Half a dozen?".

Hence statements such as "That is, what you miss is "more DPS actions" actually makes things WORSE to a lot of people AND could potentially delay real change/kick the can down the road of things that need to be done.

"I'd rather them spend 2 years working on all of it and release it all at once then slap us with an awful DPS-lite rotation and we have to suffer with that forever."


I found Ty's statement to be the most realistic way of working with the development team. It should be possible to ask for incremental changes that would introduce some positive changes, I would prefer that to some 'big bang" approach, first of all everyone suffers with the status quo with the wait, and secondly there is no guarantee whatsoever that the development accurately makes the changes that we want- then fixes take more time to implement, and with the scope of changes- all healer jobs, possibly encounter design? That's a big risk

I agree with Ty's sentiment and by extension yours, having it all done at once would just be chaotic with them working every which way, leading actual issues not even ever being addressed (potentially). But they should absolutely keep in mind of people's concerns when drawing a roadmap to that destination. (Not that you said otherwise, just stating in general because that just comes with the territory of delayed implementation.)

But yeah, I agree with Ty in that regard, if I didn't I would probably have quoted him and responded to that.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

OGCD heals are what people asked for though, healers dislike being forced to choose between damage and healing. Tank and DPS players hate dying because their healer tried to greed out some damage to beat the DPS check.
Look at how contentious ED is after all these years because it makes you choose between extra damage and doing healing for your team. Adding that portion back in is going to cause more fights about healers greeding damage or not healing people who make mistakes and eat a mechanic because "why should I take a DPS loss when you make a mistake?".

Hence why you make the damage ogcds tied to the healing kit. Kind of like how sage builds part of their gauge by having shields break from damage. I'm sure they can figure out a way to make it unique for the other healers.





We need to change the parsing meta. Combat needs to change. Healers and tanks are boring at the minute because they are just glorified dps with some extra buttons.

[VerdeLuck]

You are not going to rework the game into removing the damage gcds on healers and stop parsing culture 10 years into the life of an MMO, accept what is there and work with it.

[Shurrikhan]

OGCD heals are what people asked for though, healers dislike being forced to choose between damage and healing. Tank and DPS players hate dying because their healer tried to greed out some damage to beat the DPS check.
Look at how contentious ED is after all these years because it makes you choose between extra damage and doing healing for your team. Adding that portion back in is going to cause more fights about healers greeding damage or not healing people who make mistakes and eat a mechanic because "why should I take a DPS loss when you make a mistake?".

I'm not sure I've ever met a healer who hates having to decide between dealing damage or healing, nor is that a matter oGCDs ultimately prevent anyways.

Uniquely sourced actions, like CDs that have nothing else they can be spent on and no necessary conflicts in timing, simply forcibly allocate that portion of your output into the shape and manner of that action.

They turn an choice between healing and damage that could previously be influenced in combat (action selection) into one can be influenced almost only outside of it (job selection), outside of the occasional hybrid (damage and healing) action that has at least one use case worth holding the CD for.

That is to say, before you would have complete spending choice, and as you gained levels, you got raises increasing your purchasing power. After a point though, more and more of your would-be raises were instead given as benefits that can each only be made of in a certain way.

You get your parking spot, your corner office, dental, etc., but at cost to their perceived $ value you could otherwise have as a raise, just to prevent the "feelsbad" possibility of putting everything into your savings and nothing into your teeth.

If we actually needed healing oGCDs for burst (stacked atop GCD heals for up to some 1600+ potency of healing per GCD's time), then they wouldn't merely be ways to excuse curtailed healer damage or pull off little psychological manipulations to make healers who don't understand the party DPS loss of a death feel less bad about getting the most efficient rDPS gains they can but which don't appear on their ACT bars. But they then also wouldn't, as you suggested, prevent healers from needing to think as much about healing vs. dealing damage.

Remember, after all, that the oGCDs (and Lily) heals are what unavoidable damage taken is balanced against, not (non-Lily) GCD heals. GCDs are the mistake-fixers, and they cost as much as ever. Which is still a far sight less than not using them when necessary would cost party DPS, meaning it's ultimately *not* a party-DPS loss to use your GCD heals, so long as doing so would likely prevent a death (where not doing so would not).

[PyurBlue]

Hence why you make the damage ogcds tied to the healing kit. Kind of like how sage builds part of their gauge by having shields break from damage. I'm sure they can figure out a way to make it unique for the other healers.

This is something I've never liked. Healing and DPS need to be separate, otherwise it starts to make things clunky and intuitive. With WHM for example, you're locked out of your most powerful AoE attack unless you use lilies. The idea is that your natural healing will increase your attack options. The reality is that it's more optimal to just ignore lilies for healing unless there is downtime because they are GCD based. Or there just isn't enough damage to heal, so you're stuck with Stone/Glare. Assize is another example. It deals damage, which means that you want to use it on cooldown, but it's a heal so you also want to save it for damage to the party. So what ends up being optimal is to use it at every opportunity and ignore it as a healing tool unless it just so happens to line up with a raidwide.

On the other hand, you'd be less likely to get away with avoiding those GCDs if OGCDs couldn't cover everything. Healers might also be pressed to think more carefully about using resources on cooldown if they couldn't memorize the complete timeline of a fight.

We need to change the parsing meta. Combat needs to change. Healers and tanks are boring at the minute because they are just glorified dps with some extra buttons.

I have less issue with this, but if parsing is popular, it's probably not going away. It also wouldn't be right to take it away from the people that do enjoy it.

[Renathras]

...

I don't entirely disagree.

The thing is, there is no consensus.

For everyone who wants more damage actions there's probably a person that doesn't, a person that wants more healing actions, a person that thinks we have too many healing actions, and some poor guy that likes things as they are and doesn't want any changes, and yet another person who's entirely ambivalent. "shared enough" is a difficult thing to establish. If 5% of healers wanted more DPS actions, would that be sufficient to add more? To one healer Job or all of them? What if it was 10%? 30%? 50%? But what if 5% did not? Or 10/30/50%? Do we have to make such changes to all the healer Jobs at the same time? If, for example, we decided to add two more healer actions or so, would we have to do so for all healer Jobs? Could one get 3 and another 1? Could one get 0? And what of people that don't want more actions but rather want more interactions, like wanting a Diacloud proc that, when used, refreshes the CD on Tetragrammaton?

My concern is more that what some people want isn't what everyone wants, so solutions that just do that while leaving aside the stuff that really needs changing aren't good ideas. At best, they make no improvement to the situation, and at worse, they make it worse than it already is. As I say, I don't like DPS rotations when I play a healer. Some people do, some people don't, so a solution should have something for both. If, for example, they just put another DoT on all healers that had to be refreshed every 4 GCDs, I think that would be a worse situation than what we have right now. To some, they'd like it better, others would think it worse. Which isn't to say doing so on a healer or two is bad, but it is to say that doing it on all of them is bad, especially if there's no actual work on any of the rest of the problem. That's the entire crux of my generally proffered idea, too.

But at the least, we aren't going to get universal agreement, and we don't really have a good way to get a general feel other than "people don't agree". If even not everyone agrees that healing is a problem, it's hard to rally around a solution. Especially one that only satisfies one subset of the whole.

Fair?

...

Yeah, I agree it is...odd. I get not wanting a single point of failure to be healers in casual content, but we have so many and such powerful GCDs, that shouldn't even be an issue to begin with, and if the other roles aren't treated that way themselves...well...

OGCD heals are what people asked for though,...

SOME people.

Though I don't even think the part about choosing healing or damage is true. It's a pitiful bit of optimization, but high end SCH players swear by Energy Drain working off just that kind of question.

The statement that you quoted seems to be a real fear/paranoia of his...

How is stating what seems to be true "fear/paranoia"? Around half a dozen people have said they don't think the healing side is the problem, but most everyone else seems to agree it is.

My problem with Ty's statement is what I said.

And if we're going to ask for incremental changes, why not ask for incremental changes to the HEALING side instead of the damage side? Especially since the damage side changes you suggest are NOT universally recognized as positive?

That's half the problem, isn't it? DPS loss should really be a consideration for DPS jobs?

Very much so. It's part of what led us here, and part of what is keeping us trapped here: Treating healers as "green DPS" instead of a distinct role with distinct objectives and mechanics.

Hence why you make the damage ogcds tied to the healing kit. Kind of like how sage builds part of their gauge by having shields break from damage. I'm sure they can figure out a way to make it unique for the other healers.

We need to change the parsing meta. Combat needs to change. Healers and tanks are boring at the minute because they are just glorified dps with some extra buttons.

100% agreed.

Lilies already work this way, and WHM is the most played healer in the game by all the data we have. Clearly it's doing something right.
(For those thinking it's iconic and starts at level 1 - sure...but Black Mage is also iconic and starts at level 1, but is the least played of the Casters by the playerbase overall, and even an often distant second behind SMN for raiders. WHM being most played DOES indicate it's doing something that appeals to a lot of people.)

You are not going to rework the game into removing the damage gcds on healers and stop parsing culture 10 years into the life of an MMO, accept what is there and work with it.

This kind of thinking is why we have the problems we have.

[fulminating]

With WHM for example, you're locked out of your most powerful AoE attack unless you use lilies. The idea is that your natural healing will increase your attack options. The reality is that it's more optimal to just ignore lilies for healing

Being able to move 3 glares from filler into raid buffs means it's often more beneficial to burn lilies on nothing than ignore them. In shb content it's always a gain to burn them because misery's potency is scaled around refunding glare 3, not glare 1.