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

[Shurrikhan]

That's my point, though. Crank it too far and it's simple either unable to recover from mistakes whatsoever and/or obliges MP-efficient spam, where each healing mistake through an MP-inefficient action is just a wipe that takes up more time to resolve (since you'll oom well before the end). Variety and decision-making, with which enjoyment correlates far more than merely the intensity of incoming damage, requires a fairly precise balance of needs to total available means, and a fairly precise balance between those individual tools/means. When a game is left with shit like a 8000p heal costing barely more than a 3200p or even 800p heal, there's no way for that to scale into increased variety or decision-making because the individual tools are too far out of balance with each other and none of them actually provide any interesting interactions/conflicts with what remaining space for flexible action / downtime one may have.

[HappyHubris]

That's my point, though. Crank it too far and it's simple either unable to recover from mistakes whatsoever and/or obliges MP-efficient spam, where each healing mistake through an MP-inefficient action is just a wipe that takes up more time to resolve (since you'll oom well before the end). Variety and decision-making, with which enjoyment correlates far more than merely the intensity of incoming damage, requires a fairly precise balance of needs to total available means, and a fairly precise balance between those individual tools/means. When a game is left with shit like a 8000p heal costing barely more than a 3200p or even 800p heal, there's no way for that to scale into increased variety or decision-making because the individual tools are too far out of balance with each other and none of them actually provide any interesting interactions/conflicts with what remaining space for flexible action / downtime one may have.

This is like saying that we can't have enrage timers, because you can't entirely screw DPS up and be fine. MMO encounters are generally designed with a tolerance level that requires a floor of performance but not perfect execution.

[Shurrikhan]

This is like saying that we can't have enrage timers, because you can't entirely screw DPS up and be fine. MMO encounters are generally designed with a tolerance level that requires a floor of performance but not perfect execution.

It's not remotely like that. Again, I'm not saying you can't make healing interesting -- only that merely tuning the damage higher won't be enough because of how badly designed the actual healing actions are at present.

Healer's healing actions are too imbalanced relative to each other to prompt any decision-making. At best it would make The-Triangle-goes-in-the-Triangle-Shaped-Hole mechanics because damage intake is so intense that you must eventually trickle down to using your Cure II equivalent to meet categorical needs (as in dealing damage, STing only when its effective sustain provided is greater than can be had through AoEs). More likely, though, it would mostly devolve into all going into "the square hole" (Medica II) because you simply can't tighten the existing wildly imbalanced kit well enough to prevent that while still having any tolerance (not even enough for casual players, but even just your average Week 1 progression grinder).

Again, we're looking at skills with over 10x the healing of others, and barely even a soft CD (that requires less than three quarters' charge to break even per target) for the same cost; a spammable with 4x the healing at less MP cost than the ST spammable; etc. It's not a GCD heal kit designed for significant engagement through that healing alone. It was designed for MP being a far greater constraint and for priority conflicts with frequent offensive soft-CDs (DoTs, in the case of ARR-StB) to reward short-, mid-, and longer-term foresight.

If you want it to be engaging, that kit needs fixes first. And for players to retain interest after any performance threshold beyond "I didn't let people needlessly die," you're going to need a more interesting context for those healing actions via non-healing actions, too.

[KenZentra]

The state of the game right now is (assuming after first week of something being released) Normal mode stuff is way too easy, where healers spend 90% of the time pressing the two DPS buttons, while Savage content practically kills you outright if you get hit by anything you shouldn't be (and should be if you aren't max hp with shields and mits). So its both either too easy due to a severe lack of consistent damage dealt to the party or too hard cause of near instant death (which chain into bodycheck mechanics killing everyone).

For folks who dont do a lot of Savage for sure get super bored with their healing kit as they dont really need to use all of it. As for their DPS kit, of course it would be boring and the want for something more complex is obvious as they are basically just DPS anyways for Normal modes. So in both instances, the damage is problem. Its either so negligible that you could roll with 2 Dancers instead of healers, and in most Savage content, you need 2 healers, but if you mess up, you die and all of your party members along with you.

[Niroken]

The state of the game right now is (assuming after first week of something being released) Normal mode stuff is way too easy, where healers spend 90% of the time pressing the two DPS buttons, while Savage content practically kills you outright if you get hit by anything you shouldn't be (and should be if you aren't max hp with shields and mits). So its both either too easy due to a severe lack of consistent damage dealt to the party or too hard cause of near instant death (which chain into bodycheck mechanics killing everyone).

For folks who dont do a lot of Savage for sure get super bored with their healing kit as they dont really need to use all of it. As for their DPS kit, of course it would be boring and the want for something more complex is obvious as they are basically just DPS anyways for Normal modes. So in both instances, the damage is problem. Its either so negligible that you could roll with 2 Dancers instead of healers, and in most Savage content, you need 2 healers, but if you mess up, you die and all of your party members along with you.

Well there is the issue with encounter design being lop-sided, the issue regarding player skill increasing and also increases in ilvl as well. This is also not including solo encounters also being boring considering that you need to DPS in those as well.

It's simply not feasible for the developers to put in the time and effort to make all encounters balanced around 80% healing. Yoshi-P would rather spend his focus on making sure BLM is the best designed class in the game.

[KenZentra]

Well there is the issue with encounter design being lop-sided, the issue regarding player skill increasing and also increases in ilvl as well. This is also not including solo encounters also being boring considering that you need to DPS in those as well.

It's simply not feasible for the developers to put in the time and effort to make all encounters balanced around 80% healing. Yoshi-P would rather spend his focus on making sure BLM is the best designed class in the game.

Unfortunately. Which is kinda ironic, a MMO that is kinda proud of itself that it started over to fix the game up due to closed minded decisions at its conception, throwing away creative ideas every expansion to make things more and more simple until you get to where we are now (and later worse) where nearly all:

Healers all have the same DPS kits.
Healers all have the same Healing kits.
Tanks all have the same mitigation kits.

I dont play enough DPS classes to comment on them, but without a doubt they are becoming more homogenous as well with things such as;
Most abilities just being "Delivers and attack of X potency"
BRD songs not being support oriented.
Pets/Summons being more of just a visual thing rather than an actual entity.
Any buff being "increases Crit/damage/Direct Hit" or "reduces damage received"
and honestly the 2-minute meta as a whole.

Removing creative ideas, and adding more and more structure to the game with scripted encounters, but with encounters already being super scripted and now with the 2-minute meta the devs are now able to "script" how players engage with the heavily scripted encounters, whether that is "Players get their burst up during this time, so dont interrupt it" or "they can burst during this time, so lets put something in there they need to kill". With more structure, there is less room to grow or develop new ideas.

I'd love to eat my own words, but I agree they wont put in the time or effort. In fact, Im positive we'll lose more creative aspects of classes for new abilities that "delivers an attack that deal X potency and 50% to all others", and Black Mage gets another stack of Triple Cast so it can cope with being a Job made for a completely different game.