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

[ForsakenRoe]

What you are correct about is that I don't want to be a healbot. That's the entire reason why I fell in love with FFXIV healing in ARR, because I wasn't just a healing turret. That balance of going back and forth between healing and attacking is what FFXIV did right in the beginning. If FFXIV's healers were healing turrets from the start, which they never were, I wouldn't be here today. I wouldn't have kept up with the game probably past 2.0 even. I wouldn't have returned to future patches. I would've just finished the story, played a little of the post game, and I wouldn't have been incentivized to come back, but loving the feeling of playing Scholar brought me back and is ultimately why I'm here now.

The real question is, if T5 released today, and we had the kit of back then, the balance of back then, the jank netcode of back then... But we had the knowledge and skill of today, would we still have GCD healed and stood around so often on WHM for safety's sake? Or, knowing the fight timeline, how Twister actually works, etc, would we go balls-to-walls on damage regardless of healer, so as to get the fight down quicker, with the knowledge of how our MP costs work, how fast our MP regenerates, and how often (or not, as the case might be) damage actually goes out onto the raid? I suspect that part of the reason we didn't do damage as much back then was because we didn't know the game as well as we do now. We played safe back then in raids, to be able to see further into the fight. To try and get to Twisters again, to find out 'actually what tf is going on why are we blowing up here'. And in that regard, nothing's changed, we still play safe for prog to see further into the fight

Also same, healing a WOW raid (WOD at the time of me switching over on the account I use now) was hella boring. I never made it to level 50 as WHM on my first account, but I did make it to 58 on SCH before even entering Ishgard on this account. Playing the class was fun enough for me to want to do Levelling roulette AND MSQ roulette AND Alliance roulette, every single day. Crazy, huh

So from all that, you basically want current White Mage with minimal changes over the rest of FFXIV's lifespan, that's as competitive or the most competitive healer in terms of DPS performance, but you also want that DPS performance to be able to come from healing spells that are more GCD focused and considerably weaker in an environment that has far more frequent outgoing, constant damage, so that you can have optimal DPS through healing, but also that outgoing damage shouldn't be stronger than Barb EX in Extreme and below, somehow.

My understanding of his issue with Barb is that because of his preference for the 'hard GCD heals' like Medica, the movement required in the fight screws over the cast times. Effectively, this means that making healers more reliant on said heals, would directly conflict with such a damage profile to heal (one of fast paced movement and small fast hits against the party). I think his preferred 'heal check' is the ones where you can stand and turret heals, like Styx, Harrowing Hell (normal mode), or things like True Walking Dead from SOS (the HP-to-1 thing). Again though, that goes back to what I said about the '3 kinds of heal check designs': Hit harder, hit faster, or prevent the player from healing. And that preference of 'stand still and pump' removes option 3 as a design choice, leaving us with 'hit harder' (which we tried with Abyssos), and 'hit faster' (which, without the movement restriction of Barb EX, probably doesn't do enough on it's own to impact much unless it's insanely fast). I wouldn't mind more GCD heals on WHM, I even suggested one. But I think that the ones with cast times, the basic crap like Medica, should be looked at as 'this is the last resort', not 'this is the peak of healer gameplay'. I find it more fun to effortlessly weave healing GCDs (Raptures) while moving to dodge Barb EX's Pantokrator thing, than to stand still for two whole seconds to Medica 2, and I'm quite sure a fairly sizeable portion of the playerbase would agree

Imagine the lightning dogwolf thing in Aetherfont, the second boss. Every time it jumps, spins, whenever lightning AOEs appear on the floor, we could have it do 40% max HP damage to the party, every time, as a raidwide on top of 'actually dodge the lightning too'. It'd make you need to heal more, sure, but would it make the boss 'more fun'? I don't think it'd change the 'fun', it'd just change the button that you mash from Glare to Medica (and OOM you in less than 30s unless you change MP costs)

edit

At this point, I've said WHM getting Aero 3 and an 18 sec Dia would be acceptable (note that this would be MORE DPS buttons than SB since we'd also have Misery AND note that this is MORE to the "more DPS buttons" side than you guys used to ask for; there was a time you guys were ONLY asking for Aero 3, then it became Aero 3 + 18 sec Dia, and now it's Aero 3 + 18 sec Dia + Quake/Tornado/Flood, some burst CDs, and a gauge).

I've literally only ever asked for what I've asked for. You might be conflating me asking for the 'now its' stuff, and/or people seeing that and going 'wow actually that sounds pretty cool i'd play that', with everyone who's disagreeing with you shifting positions over time to trend towards.. apparently my idea. Which makes me a cult leader of sorts I think. Shame, I'm really not big on 'leadership positions', I'm not a fan of the responsibility, but if it gets healers fixed I guess I'll carry the burden

Also, you vastly overestimate the additional complexity added by all that stuff. You have to remember that you're a level 90 WHM, you should have a solid grip on the current job design such that picking up the new changes is very intuitive, it just slots into your current knowledge as would an expansion's additions, or a patch note change for durations and CDs. And for the newer players starting after this change were implemented (eg if it were added in 7.0 and someone started in 7.2), the new durations would be starting from level 1/4/whenever low level you get those base skills, the gauge would be at level 50 (so they are introduced to systems over time, not all at once), and I don't even know what you mean by 'burst CDs'. Cleric? I dropped that from the design a couple months ago. But you also listed Dia at 18s where I ask for it to be 12 (and have done for a year), so I think maybe you're actually on about someone else's ideas. Or you've mixed mine with another, idk