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

[PyurBlue]

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.

That's part of what I mean when I say "ignore lilies for healing". In that case you're not so much healing as you are setting up DPS. This also manifests as using OGCD heals during combat and only spending lilies when there is downtime, like a boss jumping away in a raid or between pulls in dungeons. As long as you don't overcap doing that it's the best way to use them because it negates their GCD cost.

It's less of a problem in really damage heavy fights that are more likely to force lily healing, but there is quite a of lot content where you can get away with excluding lilies as a healing resource and just considering them a prestep in maximizing DPS. I'm not sure if it bothers anyone else, but I've never liked that aspect of WHM.

[Shurrikhan]

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.

Yes, but if you have any forced period in which you otherwise couldn't attack, that's a whole filler saved by using the Lily then, rather than just the difference-of-buffs of a filler as given by using a Lily when you could attack anyways (to prep a Misery for raid buffs).

Technically, there's also the matter of mobility, if one could otherwise only Regen or replace a Dia badly early, but you get the idea.

That said, I'm not badly put off by that aspect of WHM. I do find it a tiny bit unintuitive, but not particularly clunky. It just bundles mobility and 'free" healing together in a way unique to WHM, with some consequent disadvantages but none so bad that I'd sacrifice its novelty without having a replacement of equal or greater value.

[ForsakenRoe]

I think it stems from a sort of "it's not fun to die because my healer can't heal" which I think has been the driving force behind tanks becoming so absurdly broken sustain wise this expac (how is WAR being able to heal a teammate every 25s with Nascent part of the job fantasy at all? Shouldn't they be 'too angry' to deal with someone else's booboos?) and casual content hitting like a wet fish but it really does make most content sort of "children's block shape sorter" for healing oGCDs. Put the circle block in the circle slot, put the triangle in the triangle, etc,.

Unless you're a WHM, in which case no matter what mechanic it is, it goes in the Rapture slot

"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

Exactly, what if they take, say, the whole of 7.0 to get data and implement a change for 8.0, only for it to suck and be somehow worse than what we have now? I'd also rather have small, frequent steps towards a solution so that if one step is 'not good', it can be iterated on sooner to treat the problem before it gets compounded on.

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.

Well, I did post such an idea, but certain people really don't want to have any extra growth for WHM (unless it's yet another healing button that is surplus to requirements). Also it'd be a GCD healing tool, with a refund, like Misery, that way WHM would get an identity for once: compile all your 'damage refunds' and blow everything in raidbuffs

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?

Additional healing changes will likely be very binary, just like healing itself: either it's enough to shake up the way we play, or it isn't and we carry on as normal. It will be very hard to 'notice' the change, leading to people potentially asking 'wasnt healing meant to be getting harder? When was that meant to happen'. Couple of extra buttons in the damage rotation is immediately noticeable as a change, as evidenced by the fact that the mere thought of it occurring causes such contention. And it would open up more design space for new interactions, than another healing skill would allow for, in followup patches (assuming SE actually did iterate, instead of 'rest on laurels'). For example, in one patch they add a new GCD to WHM with a 15s CD and reduce Dia to 12s, then next patch they say 'ok now people are used to that, here's a new system that plays around those previous changes: a healing tool that is charged by using those damage skills'. It wouldn't make sense to add the healing tool and it's associated gauge before the things that build said gauge, would it? Instead, it'd be made into another boring bland 60s CD, and we'd be back where we are now

Or for AST, changing Major Arcana to have the unique effects I mentioned, and if 'the cards all deal damage, but in different ways, and this allows them to have unique tertiary effects like mit or MP restore' goes down well with the players, then they can then move on to the bigger change of reworking Minor Arcana to be interesting in similar fashion

[fulminating]

That's part of what I mean when I say "ignore lilies for healing". In that case you're not so much healing as you are setting up DPS. This also manifests as using OGCD heals during combat and only spending lilies when there is downtime, like a boss jumping away in a raid or between pulls in dungeons. As long as you don't overcap doing that it's the best way to use them because it negates their GCD cost.

It's less of a problem in really damage heavy fights that are more likely to force lily healing, but there is quite a of lot content where you can get away with excluding lilies as a healing resource and just considering them a prestep in maximizing DPS. I'm not sure if it bothers anyone else, but I've never liked that aspect of WHM.

The way I view it is that the lilies are almost cemented as the first choice heal because of it, rather than ignored. Fight timeline, whether there's incoming downtime and if it's a trash pull or not depending. I don't think it's fair to say that this is the cause of prioritising oGCDs, because that's not behaviour exclusive to white mage. Scholars don't ignore adlo for lustrate, sages sageadlo for sagelustrate nor ast benefic for their myraid ogcds that I also don't know the names of. Prioritising oGCDs is just part of optimising for damage, which is ultimately the goal of every job.

[Aexnidaral]

Given the state of the game, I feel like it's easier to have more complex DPS kits for Healers; but my personal preference would be to have more complex healing kits with more damage going out.

[Renathras]

That's part of what I mean when I say "ignore lilies for healing". In that case you're not so much healing as you are setting up DPS. This also manifests as using OGCD heals during combat and only spending lilies when there is downtime, like a boss jumping away in a raid or between pulls in dungeons. As long as you don't overcap doing that it's the best way to use them because it negates their GCD cost.

It's less of a problem in really damage heavy fights that are more likely to force lily healing, but there is quite a of lot content where you can get away with excluding lilies as a healing resource and just considering them a prestep in maximizing DPS. I'm not sure if it bothers anyone else, but I've never liked that aspect of WHM.

Huh.

I kind of see it the other way around.

WHM doesn't have a lot of oGCDs (relatively speaking) that heal, just Assize and Tetra do direct healing, and Assize is generally used on CD for damage.

This means where SCH might use Whispering Dawn or AST Celestial Intersection (or Opposition? The blue icon that heals the party, not the single target half-Benison shield plus heal), WHM uses Afflatus Rapture. While you have Tetra, if you have Solace up, you can use it instead. This is less "you have a damage spell locked behind needless heals" and more "you can use Cure 2 or Medica 1 as an oGCD/damage neutral to address the healing you should need to do anyway".

Yeah, in super easy content like 4 mans, you are probably just going to do token healing to the tank and mostly do overhealing if you use Rapture, but even there, the bosses do raidwides, so you can use it for useful healing. Or you can ignore them completely; 4 man dungeons don't matter if you're optimizing Misery under raid buffs or not, so that side of the argument is kind of irrelevant.

So you're "not so much healing as you are setting up for DPS"; you're healing necessary damage you'd have to heal anyway in content more difficult than normal MSQ stuff. Everything else has places in the fight to do useful healing with Rapture and Solace, so if you're finding yourself "wasting them on needless overhealing", that means you (or your co-healer...) are wasting more oGCDs than you/they need to. If you think of 8 man encounters with 2 healers as "a combined healer toolkit" (that is, look at all the abilities of both healers as if they were one unit acting together, because that's what they are), Lilies have higher priority of use over anything aside from maybe SGE's Addersgall heals (since those are 7% of SGE's MP economy per use while Lilies replacing a Glare are 400 MP or 4% of WHM's) or WHM's own Assize (since that is 5%).

That is, if there's "needed healing", WHM's Lilies should be the first thing you AND your co-healer touch, generally speaking, to restore health. So if everyone is 100% topped off all the time without you using Lilies, in Extreme or higher content (e.g. actual stuff that hits hard), then one or both of you is doing something wrong by using other heals first. Again, unless it's a SGE throwing out 2 Keracholes and an Ixochole per minute and somehow there's zero additional damage for you to heal after factoring in Assize.

Additional healing changes will likely be very binary, just like healing itself: either it's enough to shake up the way we play, or it isn't and we carry on as normal. It will be very hard to 'notice' the change, leading to people potentially asking 'wasnt healing meant to be getting harder? When was that meant to happen'. Couple of extra buttons in the damage rotation is immediately noticeable as a change, as evidenced by the fact that the mere thought of it occurring causes such contention. And it would open up more design space for new interactions, than another healing skill would allow for, in followup patches (assuming SE actually did iterate, instead of 'rest on laurels'). For example, in one patch they add a new GCD to WHM with a 15s CD and reduce Dia to 12s, then next patch they say 'ok now people are used to that, here's a new system that plays around those previous changes: a healing tool that is charged by using those damage skills'. It wouldn't make sense to add the healing tool and it's associated gauge before the things that build said gauge, would it? Instead, it'd be made into another boring bland 60s CD, and we'd be back where we are now

Or for AST, changing Major Arcana to have the unique effects I mentioned, and if 'the cards all deal damage, but in different ways, and this allows them to have unique tertiary effects like mit or MP restore' goes down well with the players, then they can then move on to the bigger change of reworking Minor Arcana to be interesting in similar fashion

Think so?

I thought the P5-8S changes were very noticeable.

Not to mention "couple extra buttons in the damage rotation" may be noticeable BUT NOT GOOD. And they also may not be impactful. As you're fond of saying, players that don't want to use them (should be able to) continue not using them, at which point, what was noticed? That we have extra buttons we don't use?

Not to mention you point out why that's not a good idea: "the mere thought of it occurring causes such contention" kind of indicates that ISN'T where we should spend our once per 2 year bullet.

We already have design space for interactions. "Holy Might" and "Diacloud procs" are two extremely straightforward ones that require nothing new at all. We aren't using the design space we have, so what makes you think we'll get more than "Here are two more DoTs that do 10 potency over time. Have fun?" instead of something...useful?

Again, you know my position - change some, leave some - on the DPS side, but not only would just throwing more DPS buttons at all the healers alienate people (more than just me), it wouldn't fix the problems, and would make the situation worse. You MIGHT actually get more of a healer shortage, not less, as folks leave the role and wait 2 more years. "But they did that with SCH!" Which is why I shouldn't have to explain to anyone why doing it again would be bad...

[EDIT: Note here I'm not saying we CAN'T address DPS buttons on healers; but I AM saying we CANNOT have that be the only thing we do. That could make playing healers worse than now. If you slap me with some extra damage buttons but otherwise change NOTHING about healing, encounter design, etc, I just will not play healer for the expansion. And other people have said they won't as well. That cannot be our answer. Again, if you want to do it on just a healer or two like SCH and SGE OR WHM and leave the other one alone, that's a different argument. But that isn't the proposal. "more DPS buttons" proposals are always "...on ALL of the healer Jobs, whether people want them or not", and in the case of the "incremental change" argument, would be the only thing we get, meaning nothing else on the healing or encounter side.]

The way I view it is that the lilies are almost cemented as the first choice heal because of it, rather than ignored. Fight timeline, whether there's incoming downtime and if it's a trash pull or not depending. I don't think it's fair to say that this is the cause of prioritising oGCDs, because that's not behaviour exclusive to white mage. Scholars don't ignore adlo for lustrate, sages sageadlo for sagelustrate nor ast benefic for their myraid ogcds that I also don't know the names of. Prioritising oGCDs is just part of optimising for damage, which is ultimately the goal of every job.

Mhm. It's not often, but I agree with Fulminating here.

Lilies should generally be WHM's go-to heal button for healing people. The only things that rank higher are Assize if it just came off CD and can cover the healing or POTENTIALLY Tetra or Asylum IF you know you're about to have a heavy movement phase and want to save the Lilies for that. Outside of those two cases, Rapture/Solace should be the first buttons you hit. Again, possible exception being if you have a SGE co-healer.

[ForsakenRoe]

Think so?
I thought the P5-8S changes were very noticeable.

Not to mention "couple extra buttons in the damage rotation" may be noticeable BUT NOT GOOD. And they also may not be impactful. As you're fond of saying, players that don't want to use them (should be able to) continue not using them, at which point, what was noticed? That we have extra buttons we don't use?

We already have design space for interactions. "Holy Might" and "Diacloud procs" are two extremely straightforward ones that require nothing new at all. We aren't using the design space we have, so what makes you think we'll get more than "Here are two more DoTs that do 10 potency over time. Have fun?" instead of something...useful?

Again, you know my position - change some, leave some - on the DPS side, but not only would just throwing more DPS buttons at all the healers alienate people (more than just me), it wouldn't fix the problems, and would make the situation worse. You MIGHT actually get more of a healer shortage, not less, as folks leave the role and wait 2 more years. "But they did that with SCH!" Which is why I shouldn't have to explain to anyone why doing it again would be bad...

[EDIT: Note here I'm not saying we CAN'T address DPS buttons on healers; but I AM saying we CANNOT have that be the only thing we do. That could make playing healers worse than now. If you slap me with some extra damage buttons but otherwise change NOTHING about healing, encounter design, etc, I just will not play healer for the expansion.

Yes, and you prove my point. Abyssos was so sudden and such a big jump in 'extra healing needed', albeit in the 'wrong way' design wise, that it was the 'enough to shake up the way we play' side of the binary. Unfortunately, the 'shake up' for an alarmingly sized portion of the healer base was that they would be doing the fights on a different role, or not at all in some cases. If we go by the assumption that SE would gradually increase healing required over time, so people can acclimatize, then there will be several patches of 'this is not enough, it still feels the same', followed by a sudden 'actually wait this is too much go back' when it turns out they overshot it

Having the buttons there that you don't use, might well prompt some players who think they wouldn't use them, to use them. Doubly so if SE attaches additional inter-connectivity to them. Holy Might has more potential than Diacloud, IMO. Diacloud, without a Sharpcast equivalent, runs the risk of people mistakenly believing they'll get a proc before the natural reset is demanded, and thus forget when the DOT will fall off, leading to much higher amounts of DOT downtime by accident. If people manage to have issues with checking to see if Dia needs refreshing when it has a static 30s duration (spoilers, I'm one of them sometimes), then it's going to be awful when the 'time until next refresh' keeps getting reset early, and doubly so if your reset is meant to be done naturally during a movement phase in current game. The same could be said of other designs, but this Diacloud one would lead to big big damage losses by comparison.

I don't remember timeS, plural, when they added more damage buttons to a healer, and people quit because of it. I only remember times when one damage tool was replaced by another (eg your comparison of Aero3 and Misery), and times when tools were removed. In fact, the one time I remember when a tool WAS added to a healer, it was immediately after it's removal (Energy Drain) and it was the removal, not the readdition of the skill, that caused the exodus. I do also remember great reception to Misery, even in it's 'not damage neutral' form in SHB, to Purgation in 6.1's trailer, and to SGE's entire reveal, both the sneak preview video (the one in Gubal Library) and the job actions trailer, where they used 6 different 'attack skills'.

Last point, probably true, but then again, that's why I did not just suggest damage buttons for WHM. If everything I asked for got implemented, it'd get a new heal, two new shield buttons (one ST for the TBs, one AOE for raidwides), a 1min mitigation to compete vs AST's bubble, multiple changes to lower levels to make gameplay there feel better like making Rapture level 70 (so it can be used in ultimates, the mobility diff of WHM vs AST in UCOB is disgusting), making Medica 2 cause Cure 3 to have halved MP costs for it's duration, removal of Cure and Medica1 once they've outlived their usefulness in levelling, a lower level version of Misery to get people into the swing of the Misery gameplay earlier, and Divine Seal as a healing throughput CD from level 40 onwards (evolving into Temperance at 80). That's a lot more stuff than just 'more damage buttons', it's asking for a more well rounded kit that has room to breathe and grow going forward

[HappyHubris]

Neither, just a s**t-ton more incoming damage. It's boring because you're not healing much.

[Shurrikhan]

Neither, just a s**t-ton more incoming damage. It's boring because you're not healing much.

As someone who's healed in MMOs where MP concerns and incoming damage mean that you're spending 70+% of your time spamming a certain healing button, spam doesn't inherently feel better from its moving bars up instead of down. Filler/fallback spam is spam, regardless of it's putting out damage or healing. Interrelated decision-making tends to be the key to letting even a small kit feel engaging, but XIV heals are just not set up to be capable of that no matter how high you crank up healing requirements, especially without the competing offensive soft-CDs and MP concerns we used to have (which were themselves useful mechanics only because we still had MP enough and low enough damage intake to actually allow for those trade-offs and variety in button presses).

[HappyHubris]

As someone who's healed in MMOs where MP concerns and incoming damage mean that you're spending 70+% of your time spamming a certain healing button, spam doesn't inherently feel better from its moving bars up instead of down. Filler/fallback spam is spam, regardless of it's putting out damage or healing. Interrelated decision-making tends to be the key to letting even a small kit feel engaging, but XIV heals are just not set up to be capable of that no matter how high you crank up healing requirements, especially without the competing offensive soft-CDs and MP concerns we used to have (which were themselves useful mechanics only because we still had MP enough and low enough damage intake to actually allow for those trade-offs and variety in button presses).

Strong disagree on "70% of of your time spamming a certain healing button," because a lot of incoming damage often requires switching up tools and making decisions on throughput vs efficiency, using procs, using mitigation, deploying cooldowns, building resource layers, etc.

And it's way, way better than spamming glare or broil or whatever for more than 70% of casts. People who play this game like to pooh pooh actual MMO healing, then go back to hitting that glare key like a woodpecker.