I'm bored when I heal because I need more complex DPS rotations

[Mithron]

64 pages is a lot. Seems like there is a consensus that healer rotations need some adjusting. Hopefully in the upcoming media tour we hear about this-- I mean there's multiple healers so surely they can experiment with at least one of them and see if the game collapses due to one healer having a tiny more interesting dps rotation.

Bc doesn't Yoshi P want consensus...

I have an older one of 30 pages as well, but sub forums don't get as much traction as General does.

[Sani2341]

64 pages is a lot. Seems like there is a consensus that healer rotations need some adjusting. Hopefully in the upcoming media tour we hear about this-- I mean there's multiple healers so surely they can experiment with at least one of them and see if the game collapses due to one healer having a tiny more interesting dps rotation.

Bc doesn't Yoshi P want consensus...

I mean we also have a thread about essentially the same topic, with the same ideas floating around going for over 200 pages:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-play-Ultimate

[Turtledeluxe]

I mean we also have a thread about essentially the same topic, with the same ideas floating around going for over 200 pages:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-play-Ultimate

343 likes as well. I wonder how many likes are needed before it is consensus.

My point just being, people have been talking about this all patch cycle with a lot of agreement occurring but the dev team hasn't meaningfully commented. If there's no update for 7.0 then imo Yoshi P needs to clarify what exactly it takes to reach consensus, assuming that it's a tangible thing and not a PR excuse.

[Shougun]

My feedback would be to move healers away from shield / not shield and into offensive heal and support heal. In general healer's damage might increase, but it would also be more likely to be considered in content for "are your team members doing enough?". There are a few primary reasons why I think spending too much time on healers should just heal is going to be nigh impossible:

1) We have linear gear growth (gear go BRR healing power goes up, defensive abilities go up, time to death goes down, all leading to less heals needed on a multi-variable problem)
2) You'll have to nerf tanks and potentially other jobs sustain as well (No one likes nerfs lol)
3) You'll have to nerf healing power and or also potentially redesign mechanics to demand more (oGCD heals can save the day on their own, if you want a healer to be healing their little healer hearts out you can't solve problems in one button for even slightly extended periods of time)
4) If you make too high of a demand you essentially create a very large space of failure and a narrow window of success. If healing demands increase a lot such that healers HAVE to heal all the time, that means if you flub your party dies. A lot of additional stress will be introduced by that, and probably a lot of "welp lets abandon this duty, the healer sucks and so we're never going to win". Even tanks can kind of suck and still win lol.

Therefore:

Healing as a concept is diametrically opposed to everyone and anyone doing well, the better your team is the less important you and your primary goal will be. While if you make healing too important such that healing HAS to be done, and it is one of those things that will be on a time line compounding issues if you messed up trying to catch back up the stream-- failure will be a lot easier and it'll primarily be one person's fault.

Tank uses defensive cooldowns well? Less heals.
Everyone deals great damage? Less heals.
Everyone performs mechanics? Less heals.
SE doesn't make content hard enough that people can regularly fail it (unlikely, except for new savage / ultimate)? Less heals.
You know your job very well and so you use the most optimum skills for the situation? Guess what, less heals.
You're well geared? You heal more, less heals.
Everyone else is well geared? They take less damage, less heals.

Practically everything in the game points to the purpose of heals being less valuable if anyone is doing the right thing. The best time for healers being a healer in normal content is when you're with a pack of dodos lol. If you somehow address those issues, you will be on the other side where you will approach "healer healed tank too late, incoming damage in 2 minutes will overcome the cast time of healer- we failed the mission, next time don't wait 2 seconds to heal me".

Therefore, alternatively, rather than changing many jobs, many mechanics, many pieces of gear, and whole game wide structures... in a huge spider web that you probably wont even solve anyways... How about we just make healers more engaging without having to fully address that issue (by giving healers OTHER engagement on top of healing).

So- to provide two types of styles, engaging more people who want to be on the healer role. You add offensive and 'defensive' (support) healers. Support healers will be essentially the support class, their skills will result in damage, but from making the dreamwork via teamwork.

Sage and Scholar would be offensive healers, and as a lazy example many of the mechanics that used to exist on Scholar would be brought back. Which includes more offensive attack spells and a bit more interaction from the fairy. Sage would have even more focus on Kardia type mechanics, AoE Kardia! Weee, lol. As a general mantra while healers would have to switch targets, they should also frequently have an enemy in their sights. There will need to be skills that help them balance resources and needs around that idea (like Scholars would save big heals and for smaller needs would tell the fairy that she was a good little tinkerbell and then eviscerate the enemy). Many skills that were pure heal might become mix and or be blended into existing heal spells while new offensive mechanics are added (which is to say button bloat isn't the goal). In an expansion setting you'd expect half your skills at worst to be offensive related (though they may have combat elements in them as well).

For both the above and below healer concepts may introduce capped interactive skills. An issue Astrologian had when they could buff an entire party was 5% on 8 was worht more than on 4, and on top of that depending on what job and who you were with it could be even more inconsistent. Potentially can avoid that by saying "10% extra damage up to 500 potency". "Deals 100 potency per attack up to 500". Etc. Etc.

I think in my dark healer thread I had suggested hemorrhaging spine (curse themed healer lol) which increased damage by a fixed potency from the rear and ranged up to a fixed value. One potential benefit being given the fixed value, if you make the buffs last a fair amount they can 'tend' to be full value as long as even a few people are trying.

Some other ideas brought up for that offensive healer were monster curse (heals) where you would prevent damage coming from the target (not to supplant normal heals, just a supplement), Damage Pets, Auras with interactions (so they don't just sit on your bar), RoA / DoA (regen / damage on action debuff mechanics, kardia vaguely is like the idea), offensive spell that can be used on allies as a heal, and Gray Health which was simply a way to layer in new healing spells (if you 'prepped' a player you could more effectively return their health). https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/392280

White Mage and Astrologian then become support healers. For example with Astrologian we go a bit back into unique and powerful cards (with a generic undertone of buffing, just incase). These jobs will target the enemy less often, even if they did interact with the enemy it will most likely not require targeting the enemy to do so. These jobs target their allies, a lot.

You might see Enstone early on for CNJ that increases the damage of an ally. Stoneskin may be brought back where when it breaks within X seconds it deals extra damage, otherwise dealing damage when broken / expired (gives you a skilled play opportunity but a skill floor as well).

Both jobs might see some healing spells condense, some removed (with thought put into ensuring ultimate isn't impossible due to a change in healing potential), and then new spells added based on the job's enemy or ally basis. All jobs will be able to contribute damage, how they do it would be different. Shields might still have some bias but it's less of a concern now, as there is a new one lol.

For jobs that are ally oriented their skills will have an exception for solo play. For example Blue Mage's basic instinct had code written to work when players are incapacitated / alone. If a spell needs a bonus effect to not nerf the job when alone (so you're not a WHM thinking "I wish I was a SGE, cause I have no one to buff"). While normally playing all the cards on yourself or your chocobo, in a party, would be bad, there might be a passive that appears that helps with that when alone.. "The house always wins" - grants self maximum benefit for cards used. Or something.

[CaptainLagbeard]

A Healer's job in a good party mostly just ends up being to spam their one attack, and some basic sustain for arena wides.

Also unironically, for SGE the better the party is the harder time they will have as their main source for MP regen is using their Addersgalls to heal... And if nobody's taking damage, you'd need to spend GCDs to overheal to get MP.


One thing that could be done is adding in more attack options to use the Job resources...
An attack (Seraph Strike) that spends Lilies for WHM, something better than Energy Drain for SCH... An attack that uses Addersgall for SGE... AST is supposed to be getting a rework so I dunno about it.

[Supersnow845]

A Healer's job in a good party mostly just ends up being to spam their one attack, and some basic sustain for arena wides.

Also unironically, for SGE the better the party is the harder time they will have as their main source for MP regen is using their Addersgalls to heal... And if nobody's taking damage, you'd need to spend GCDs to overheal to get MP.


One thing that could be done is adding in more attack options to use the Job resources...
An attack (Seraph Strike) that spends Lilies for WHM, something better than Energy Drain for SCH... An attack that uses Addersgall for SGE... AST is supposed to be getting a rework so I dunno about it.

Which is exactly why despite all the complaining people do energy drain is still somehow the better designed system

Who the hell thought that a system that makes you overheal yourself with druachole to get mana was a well designed system, the least they could have done is if the addersgall is going to overcap it just passively gives you 700 mp but it’s not like SGE needs to be made any easier

[Nabril]

We don't want our DPS rotations to be just pressing 1 button ad nauseam. How the developers achieve that is up to them. I personally don't care whether it is to reduce downtime between healing or whether they give us a few more buttons to press in downtime. Stormblood SCH was in a much better state DPS wise - if some of those elements came back, it would reduce the monotony (and the point is that they've already achieved this before).

I wouldn't mind losing some of my healing buttons to make space for the DPS buttons. A lot of these buttons don't have meaningful differences, and I am okay with using more GCD heals to keep up with the damage.

Realistically, they'll never manage to increase healing requirements to make current healers useful in anything but the hardest content. This is why I a slightly more interesting DPS rotation is a better solution.

Name me one job that just pushes one button. Name me one. Sure as hell aren't any I've played. Not one job just hits one button. You're lying and exaggerating.

[CaptainLagbeard]

Name me one job that just pushes one button. Name me one. Sure as hell aren't any I've played. Not one job just hits one button. You're lying and exaggerating.

Well, yea. You're right. Healers don't just press one button. We have a DoT as well, so that's two buttons.

[Nabril]

Wrong game, in this one healers dps and you will accept it. So more dps interactions pls, pvp sage is an example of what it should be.

Indeed. Healers need Enochian. They need to maintain that by DPSing and heal carefully so that they the timer on Enochian doesn't expire. If it does, they need to wait out the cool down before they can begin DPSing again.

THAT would add excitement to healing! If you want to DPS, struggle! And if anyone thinks this is too hard- we Black Mages know how to manage Enochian. It's not hard. Healers can do it.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Here we go again… lmao