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

[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