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

[Shurrikhan]

When Jobs/roles are changed out from under people, it's almost always bad. Especially when there's a way to do it that doesn't leave those people homeless. It doesn't matter whether the change is more complex or more simple, the result is the same, and it's bad unless you give those people some safe port in the storm.

In other words, "The stopping point around which a given status quo should be given additional weight for the mere fact of existing at that point in time... is wherever it favors my interests, regardless of however many healer mains' favored experiences were stripped from them to the point of their leaving their main job, role, or even the game in getting to the point I like and want protected."

"Don't let me do any more than I do now, as I don't want to feel encouraged to do any more than this. No, I don't care that others' experiences had to be trimmed/dumbed down just to get here."

Though to be fair, Happy, they all want a DPS rotation on healers.

Wanting the occasional priority conflict and some actual decision-making does not make a "DPS rotation". Wanting a bit more downtime complexity, especially to add some aforementioned priority conflict when paired with increased healing requirements, does not make a "DPS rotation". Stormblood healers did not have a "DPS rotation".

Maybe we should flip the script and have all healer damage spells be oGCDs and heals be GCDs only, I dunno. Something to drive home the point "This is the role for people that like to heal, not people that want to be damage dealers, as there's already a role for that."

So, a worst of all possible worlds... just out of spite? In order for healers not to spend large portions of their time merely idle, there'd have to be almost zero ability for them to help the party recover for mistakes -- something generally considered a feature, not merely a burden, of healing.

The only players to whom outright replacing any ability to contribute outside of healing --and therefore have one's contributions scale with competence without necessarily making the role painfully inaccessible (and with wholly bimodal, non-scaling contribution even then)-- would appeal is those who want an easier time of same-monitor Netflix-and-fill-while-cycling-CDs.

[ty_taurus]

Wanting the occasional priority conflict and some actual decision-making does not make a "DPS rotation". Wanting a bit more downtime complexity, especially to add some aforementioned priority conflict when paired with increased healing requirements, does not make a "DPS rotation". Stormblood healers did not have a "DPS rotation".

I'm not really sure what others deem a "rotation" Because in my mind, the requirements for a set of attacks to be considered a "rotation" is extremely low. If Sage got the PVP treatment of reducing the DoT duration to 15 seconds, reducing Phelgma's cooldown to 20 seconds, made Pneuma a DPS tool instead of a healing tool every 60 seconds, and made Toxikons OGCD and generated offensively, that I would describe as a rotation. I would describe Stormblood Scholar as having a rotation. What makes current healers not have a rotation in my eyes is that repeatedly casting a single spell is not a rotation because there is no looping of anything, and there isn't enough variation to keep the healer breaking away from that. It's one thing if there's a rhythm where you're, say, casting your neutral three times, then doing something else, but having... what is it? twelve casts of your neutral game between DoT application? When you have repetition of action usage in games, generally you do it in groups of twos, threes, or fours, not groups of twelves.

[Shurrikhan]

I'm not really sure what others deem a "rotation" Because in my mind, the requirements for a set of attacks to be considered a "rotation" is extremely low.

That's fair. I suppose the term is pretty vague.

I would generally consider it an APL (action priority list) of at least 3 non-glideable (e.g., can't just key-swipe a step that's never worth holding and is greyed out except on proc) steps among spammables OR at least 3 non-fillers (where glides procced by and which glide into the filler count as the filler) of frequent use and which doesn't spend more than two-thirds of its casts of a given category on a single action (again, including its glide, if any), which is still extremely light so far as "rotations" go.

...Though, by that count, neither does Bard have a rotation among its GCDs unless combining AoE, ST, and treating Apex Arrow as a standard weaponskill. 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,2 (of RA>BS, IJ) is no more a rotation than 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,2 is (Broil, Biolysis), imo.

And for a rotation (this over this over this) to be at all "interesting", imo, it should also have a sort of meta-rotation. For instance, two skills that normally have a fixed priority over each other may shift that priority under some other condition, so that your "Do's" and "Don't" rotate into new frameworks, or may be grouped into larger series with a degree of player control that rewards player knowledge or, in a lack of complete knowledge or reliability therefrom, player intuition / a good gamble.

[AmiableApkallu]

When trying to define "rotation", I would draw inspiration from The Balance's BLM guide:

A line is a sequence of casts with specific characteristics that ends after a fire phase. A rotation refers to a line or lines that can feasibly loop and repeat itself. This is why only the standard line is typically referred to as a rotation, while other lines are more strictly referred to as lines.

So, I would call 121111111111 a rotation, albeit a trivial and uninteresting one (more on this in a moment). I can imagine SGE having "Kardia lines" that allow it to respond to various healing scenarios, but where those sequences of actions cannot be looped upon themselves indefinitely, and thus wouldn't form a rotation.

Now, 121111111111 is uninteresting because it's entirely "filler", which I would describe as:

Actions that do not build up anything or towards anything, and that do not themselves have the feel of ending or finishing some sequence of actions.

That informs my thinking whenever someone talks about "interactivity" or "interactions" in a kit.

===

I think we're all in agreement that healers -- whether it be via job design, encounter design, or some combination of the two -- need to spend less time on filler. By my definition, I think there's also a fair argument to be made that most healing skills are also filler.

[Shurrikhan]

Is rotational complexity the real goal here? Healers' rotations have always been vastly simpler than their Caster DPS equivalents.

I'm not sure we quite have a concensus on "rotation" as applicable to healers specifically, but we at least have a many-times-liked post here, from 8 pages back:

When trying to define "rotation", I would draw inspiration from The Balance's BLM guide:

A line is a sequence of casts with specific characteristics that ends after a fire phase. A rotation refers to a line or lines that can feasibly loop and repeat itself. This is why only the standard line is typically referred to as a rotation, while other lines are more strictly referred to as lines.

So, I would call 121111111111 a rotation, albeit a trivial and uninteresting one (more on this in a moment). I can imagine SGE having "Kardia lines" that allow it to respond to various healing scenarios, but where those sequences of actions cannot be looped upon themselves indefinitely, and thus wouldn't form a rotation.

Now, 121111111111 is uninteresting because it's entirely "filler", which I would describe as:

Actions that do not build up anything or towards anything, and that do not themselves have the feel of ending or finishing some sequence of actions.

That informs my thinking whenever someone talks about "interactivity" or "interactions" in a kit.

===

I think we're all in agreement that healers -- whether it be via job design, encounter design, or some combination of the two -- need to spend less time on filler. By my definition, I think there's also a fair argument to be made that most healing skills are also filler.

For my part, I want more decision-making (i.e., rewards for awareness and foresight and, short of perfect foreknowledge, precise gambles) more so than just a many-step loop or the like (which seems to lose novelty far faster, imo), but I'm fine with a large portion of the decision-making regarding damage-dealing coming from working around the CDs or soft-CDs of healing spells and vice versa.

Such may not make striking dummy combat exciting yet, but... if it manages even 80% of what WAR/PLD striking dummy manages, I'm not about to complain. More would be better, but that much is fine to me.