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

[Sebazy]

But alright, you have a fleshed out DPS rotation with procs and maybe even you job gauge is changed to fit with it. Now you do damage more often, or even more of it! However, enrages will be more strict as you are now designed around dealing more damage than before

Hold up just a second:

A decent blue log in P12S will see a healer using DPS GCDs at a ratio of 10 to 1 or more vs healing GCDs right now (At least on SCH, AST and Sadge, WHM will be lower due to Lilies ofc).

How do we fit in more dps abilities than we do already? Where is the assumption that we will do more damage with a 'fleshed out dps rotation' coming from? The amount of damage we do isn't decided by the complexity of our rotations, it's decided by how much potency we get, how it scales with our MND stat and how easily we can shovel it into the burst window.

Healers getting more do to isn't going to automagically make enrage timers tighter. If anything history has shown it to be the absolute opposite actually, remember E8S and how it was a complete snooze fest to heal with the add phase literally being the heal check? Yep, I think it makes a fair case for being the fight where healers were obligated to contribute the most DPS in perhaps any savage, not because healers had complex damage rotations, but because they had nothing else to do except spam glare for large swathes of the fight.

[KenZentra]

Hold up just a second:

A decent blue log in P12S will see a healer using DPS GCDs at a ratio of 10 to 1 or more vs healing GCDs right now (At least on SCH, AST and Sadge, WHM will be lower due to Lilies ofc).

How do we fit in more dps abilities than we do already? Where is the assumption that we will do more damage with a 'fleshed out dps rotation' coming from? The amount of damage we do isn't decided by the complexity of our rotations, it's decided by how much potency we get, how it scales with our MND stat and how easily we can shovel it into the burst window.

Healers getting more do to isn't going to automagically make enrage timers tighter. If anything history has shown it to be the absolute opposite actually, remember E8S and how it was a complete snooze fest to heal with the add phase literally being the heal check? Yep, I think it makes a fair case for being the fight where healers were obligated to contribute the most DPS in perhaps any savage, not because healers had complex damage rotations, but because they had nothing else to do except spam glare for large swathes of the fight.

So how do you view a more fleshed out DPS kit? Will it do the same amount of damage it does right now, less, or more? How do you expect these abilities to interact with each other?
The only things I can think of is procs, DoTs, combos and charges.

So, if you cast, lets say Glare, you can get "Blinding Glare". Does Glare to its current damage or less than that? If its less, does "Blinding Glare" make up the difference in the sense of to original Glare casts, or does it do more than what two original Glare casts would do?
DoTs dont really solve anything per se, so unless there is something interesting that can be done with that, im just going to leave it at not really solving the issue at hand.
For combos, again, they either start off doing less, unless you finish it, in which they are still the same potency as however many Glares it would take before, or it does more damage than that.
You have a few actions to choose from, but they all have charges (except Glare), Do they all just do the same damage as each other, and glare is less than that?

The issue Im seeing is that it Healers need to complete their rotation, before switching to healing. And that if you dont have to worry about switching to healing, that you are just a DPS anyways.

And again, not that this is what you are advocating for, but this is the problem I think of when expanding DPS kits and how they are inevitably going to be "This does more damage overall" thus enforcing that Healers are DPS 1st and Healers 2nd.

[Maltothoris]

The issue Im seeing is that it Healers need to complete their rotation, before switching to healing. And that if you dont have to worry about switching to healing, that you are just a DPS anyways.

Thing is they fixed this issue with melees and tanks with the fact that using their range attack no longer interrupts their combos and some stuff for the paladin like holy spirit and atonement not disrupting it as well. iF you could applying the same thing with healers it could work and not a full dps rotation. FOr whm it would something ala Black mage lite. Maybe integrate it like one stance increases damage dealted in a small amount and then the other stance increase healing and some mit since whm lacks mit. An idea but again the reason we are at his part is that Yoshi and his team may play healers but they do not MAIN healers and thus are somewhat fools on the matter.

[ForsakenRoe]

So how do you view a more fleshed out DPS kit? Will it do the same amount of damage it does right now, less, or more? How do you expect these abilities to interact with each other?
The only things I can think of is procs, DoTs, combos and charges.

The main issue most people seem to have with current healer DPS kit, is how big the difference in 'number of uses per minute' there is between our filler (Glare etc) and 'literally anything else in the kit'. Tackling that, by reducing how often Glare is cast (by expanding how often other things are used) would go a long way to quelling the unrest, I think. To that end, what I'd do to WHM:

- new gauge, 0-100 bar style (can be any other max number, make it 0-50, 0-500, doesn't matter to me, I'll just go with 0-100 cos it's what we know from other jobs)
- Glare now gives 1 gauge
- Dia is now 12s duration (meaning 5 uses per minute instead of 2), and gives 1 gauge on cast, and 1 per tick (total of 5)
- Water (upgrading into Banish) has a 15s CD and gives 5 gauge on cast. Also it's instant for mobility
- Holy gives 2 gauge per enemy hit (so in a trash pull of 7 mobs, that is 14 gauge per cast)
- 50 gauge is spent on an AOE heal. I call it 'Blessing of the Elementals', but you could just as easily call it Cure 4, name's not set in stone
- using the new heal gives 3 buffs (or elements on the job gauge, to prevent buff cap issues), associated with earth, water, wind. Stacks to 2 of each

- while you have these stacks, Glare becomes Quake (100p stronger and 50% damage falloff for AOE), Banish becomes Flood (100p stronger and 50% damage falloff for AOE), and Dia becomes Tornado (30p stronger on cast,
20p per tick, totalling 110p. Also is 50% damage falloff for AOE, so you can DOT big packs with it). This all combines to make the heal damage neutral with one Glare, taking inspiration from Misery (and how well received it is)

- With Glare at 310, Dia totalling 430 (150 on cast, 70 per tick) and Banish at 350, the total potency per minute from GCDs is a mere 60p a minute higher than our current output (8140 now vs 8200 projected), so damage checks can remain as they are and be unaffected

So it sounds like a lot maybe, but in the end it would boil down to 'press Dia every 5th GCD, Banish every 6th, Glare as filler'. But it opens many doors for optimizations, and design space for the devs to add new things later, like new actions that build gauge, spend gauge, a CD that makes your gauge spending free for 3 uses like Inner Release, etc. Just the fact that there's AOE damage falloff to the elemental abilities, means that we go from 'just spam Holy in AOE' to having three new damage buttons to use when doing dungeon trash pulls, greatly enhancing the variety in visuals we'd be seeing. Our 'optimal burst window' would change from 'Dia, Misery, 6 Glares' to something like 'Tornado, Flood, Misery, Quake, Quake, Tornado, Glare, Flood'. And of course, the main point, doing this would change us from doing Fig A, to Fig B:



Reducing our Glare usage from 75%, to about 30%. Or less, depending on if we need to actually cast a Medica 2 or something occasionally. But, the important thing to note is that if we have to heal with a damage losing GCD like Medica 2, it either replaces a Glare, or it replaces a Dia/Banish but we then move that skill backwards by a GCD, we don't lose the cast, we just adjust it along the timeline such that we still push a Glare off. So if anything, something like this helps us to preserve our damage output, because it's the 'lowest contributor', Glare, that gets sac'd to do that heal

They don't have to do this exactly, of course, but the general idea behind it, of reducing how often we cast Glare by increasing how often we cast other things, is what they should aim to do IMO. If they increase healing required of us such that it puts heavy pressure on the timing of the use of 'Cure 4', such that you can't just hold it and burn it right before raidbuffs (which you could do to optimize if you wanted to, that's intentional), that'd be great too. But I think that adding a kit similar to this as a groundwork to build that 'extra healing required' onto is probably a better idea. I dunno about others, but I feel like I have to resort to things like Medica 2 faster on WHM than any other healer. I think back to Curtain Call in P4S and how much easier it was to manage as an AST, just because of how many more tools they have at their disposal

I've done idea-thinking for the other 3 healers, but WHM is the one I cared about the most at the time since I mained it, and it's the one I believe is most in need of such a shakeup, so it's the one I put the most effort into

[KenZentra]

Snip

I really like what you've shown here and breaking down what it could look like. Thank you so much!

I like the idea that you build gauge by doing DPS, but it also ties into healing as well without it looking like you'd need to continue your rotation to completion before needing to heal with a GCD AND on top of that it ties back into when you use your DPS. You could easily interrupt your DPS to heal, and with a good deal of wiggle room, you (hopefully) dont need to worry about capping a resource you gain from healing.

While I still hope for more healing GCDs, as thats what I like, the synergy from both doing your DPS and using the heal via the Job Gauge is something I think should've already been implemented. It just feels like what you said should've been done long ago it just feels that... fundamental? If that makes any sense? Like doesn't seem obvious that even when you do have to DPS (even if it were not very often) that it should contribute someway to your healing, not just as a reward of "Oh you efficiently healed the party, here is some time to do some extra damage", but even "You efficiently healed, here is some time to do extra damage, which will also further your ability to heal".

Again, thanks for your break down of what it would look like, genuinely!

[ForsakenRoe]

That's because our oGCDs were weaker (something people have asked for and been told we can't do that since it would make past encounters impossible)

I'm not sure which OGCD you refer to, but I remember a time when Indom was 500p and now it's 400. Fairy potencies are roughly equal to how they were in SB (they just fixed pet scaling being unintuitive), but they still used to be stronger thanks to Rouse. I suppose you could make the argument that back then we had less, true, for example on AST we didn't have CO as 'second Helios', it was used to extend card durations and had no healing attached.

On the subject of 'something we can't have (weaker OGCDs)', we did actually try that, though not by choice: AST released in 5.0 with 'weaker OGCDs'. You can see the 'panic buffs' to rectify that here:

Since SE buffed them by like 50% (or in some cases, even more), I would call that a good case study on 'actually maybe we can't just reduce OGCD power by 50%'. It wasn't just a case of people complaining because AST was struggling to compete vs WHM (and WHM being cracked for the first time in like 3.5 years), people didn't seem to like the idea of being forced to cover the healing with GCD heals because 'their OGCDs aren't enough to keep up'

Wildstar called, it wants a word with you sir.

Damn that's a name lost to the ages

[Sebazy]

So how do you view a more fleshed out DPS kit? Will it do the same amount of damage it does right now, less, or more? How do you expect these abilities to interact with each other?
The only things I can think of is procs, DoTs, combos and charges.

IMHO right now the biggest issue with the core concept and gameplay loop of FFXIV healers is that when played at a decent level, pressing glare is either the optimal choice or very close to it.

It's absolutely bonkers to me that SE have continued down this path despite repeatedly claiming 'we want healers to heal more, we don't tune around healer dps' etcetc and yet here we are. Need to heal someone? Glare > Benison > Tetra, want to heal lots of people? Glare > PI > Rapture. Want to raise? Glare > Swiftcast > Raise etcetc. You can say 'But Seb, just drop your cast and swiftcast > raise right off the bat to which my response is simply: That's when you randomly get Swiftcast not taking effect and that raise not being instant, weaving Swiftcast off a Glare solves that entirely.

It's wrong and borderline absurd to me that I should want to weave swift off a glare to remove the risk of it bugging out and not making the raise instant but here we are. Yet another little facet of the game that's encouraging us to just take our brains out and mindlessly smash glare.

This is big part of why I'm actually softer on WHM than I am the other healers, at least with WHM our Lily spenders rival Glare for value per GCD. For the rest, they are locked in firmly and it sucks, doubly so for AST which just shouldn't be. It has so much potential to play like a completely different healer, it's got some truely great ideas like Macro but yet once it's done shovelling all it's cards as tightly into that 2 minute burst window as it can mange, it spends the next ~100 seconds or so playing like any other healer.

Worrying about healers doing more damage is completely missing the point, that's not the goal here. I used to be able to do more DPS than a well played and well geared DPS job in dungeons back in HW as SCH and I'll be the first to admit that was a broken state of affairs. Our damage output relative to other jobs has dropped significantly over the years yet you'll struggle to find people complaining specifically about the numbers themselves.

Basically, I want us to be in a situation where I can do an alliance roulette or such but still get value from thinking about what GCD I'm pressing. As long as the answer isn't nearly always 'Glare' and when it isn't it's 'Dia', I suspect I'll be much happier than I am now. Rather than me waffle on more about all the different ideas I've thrown at these boards over the years, my suggestion would be to go watch some SWTOR or Warhammer Online (if you can find any decent PoVs at least) healer gameplay. Both offered up vastly superior healer concepts to what we have now.

[EDIT: Yes yes, people can say all they want a second DoT and a 3 hit combo burst every 2 minutes will make them not bored...but really? C'mon. That's going to be "novel" for a week, "exiting" for half that, and within 6 months, those same people will be demanding more DPS actions because they're still bored. That doesn't make sense to base the problem/solution on, since it not only ignores everyone else, but it also probably doesn't even address the needs of THOSE players, either.]

You keep saying this, but if that's the case, where was this discussion back in the later half of HW and all of Stormblood? Creator laid the foundations that we are still sat on today, SCH and AST had all the resources they needed to spend significant chunks of time nuking if not to the same extremes that we have now, and of course Stormblood just moved us ever closer to where we are now and finally gave WHM the resources needed to spam rocks as well.

The only comparable issue I can remember back then was one I raised myself at the media preview for Stormblood which was SCH losing it's spammable AoE for 4.0 which was swiftly course corrected.

Why was it fine back then for years, but would be a problem now within 6 months?

More healing alone CAN work.

How many times do I have to debunk this claim. GFC man. I've quite literally done the math and calculated cleanly and openly for you that even if we half our healing potency, it would take a round the clock Harrowing Hell Normal to get us spending 2/3rds of our GCDs on heals.

Harrowing Hell, 24/7. With halved healing potency.

Wildstar called, it wants a word with you sir.