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

[Sani2341]

They would much sooner employ a system of 'upward balance' through job buffs alone, just to avoid the backlash.

You and I must have exceedingly different definitions of 'job buffs'. Considering half the Healer changes going into shb could be summed Up as 'how dare you have Something worthwhile the other healers lack, let's take it away'

[Lyth]

...

Like I said, the transition between two expansions is where stealth nerfs generally happen. I can't think of too many examples where they openly reduced the potency of an action or remove an effect in the middle of an expansion (although I think most of the exceptions have been from this expansion). Even if a job has a significant dps advantage over all the others in its role category, they would much sooner buff every other job than reduce the dps numbers on that single job down to parity.

Keep an open mind and watch what happens during the transition period into Dawntrail. This is where they'll go after outstanding balance issues that they've wanted to address throughout Endwalker, but haven't dared to nerf publically.

[Mithron]

The main consensus I'm seeing here is that dedicated healer mains aren't happy and want more to do than 80% 1 button, while some non-healer mains say there's no problem and just to go play other roles. Most others, myself included, want healers to have actual DPS rotations and less OGCD heals, while a small minority want to just be heal slaves with minimal to no DPS at all.

[Aravell]

The main consensus I'm seeing here is that dedicated healer mains aren't happy and want more to do than 80% 1 button, while some non-healer mains say there's no problem and just to go play other roles. Most others, myself included, want healers to have actual DPS rotations and less OGCD heals, while a small minority want to just be heal slaves with minimal to no DPS at all.

I think part of the problem is that people come in here and see the title asking for a rotation, then they immediately jump to assume that what we want is a full-blown MNK or BLM rotation when that couldn't be further from the truth.

[Mortex]

The main consensus I'm seeing here is that dedicated healer mains aren't happy and want more to do than 80% 1 button, while some non-healer mains say there's no problem and just to go play other roles. Most others, myself included, want healers to have actual DPS rotations and less OGCD heals, while a small minority want to just be heal slaves with minimal to no DPS at all.

The greatest problem is fight design and how scripted it is. There will always be a perfect healing rotation with ogcd tools. Same as you have now spreadsheet fights if you aren’t sch + sgn in a comp.

Let’s say we take away ogcd heals. The biggest change would be to use a gcd heal for a glare or other 1 buttons, somewhere in between so it would just take 1 hotbar 3 and make it 1 hotbar 1 (my hotbar layout). A dps rotation would effectively give you depending on downtime and kill time and other situations things to do. And it would not in anyway, shape or form grieve the players that didn’t use dmg spells even if they have 2 spells.

Or a more wild solution would be a symbiosis of healer dmg kit and healing kit. But that takes way more planning and thinking into the mix and we all know the job design team doesn’t do that for the healer role.

[Lyth]

??

Actually the case put forward was that 'mains' don't exist, because everyone 'plays everything'. I personally don't agree with this, as there's not enough time to equally gear and maintain your skillset on every job, but you can't have it both ways.

Pandering aside, there are few issues worth considering here. There has been a progressive shift in design philosophy away from a classical 'trinity' setup, in favor of a more modern action MMO format where everyone is DPS with varying degrees of support functionality.

This naturally erodes the value of a healer, because everyone brings their own shields and heals (the only thing missing are 'potion' and 'phoenix down' role actions with a fixed number of charges available to every job). Then you throw in some tanks, like PLD and WAR, which have built in healer functionality simply by executing their rotation, and then you're left questioning what your healer's function is in the first place.

There is a lot of redundancy in support gameplay. If your tank dies, you have a spare. If your healer dies, your DPS puts out the raise. The boss positions and orientates itself on behalf of the tank. The tank self-regens, self-heals, and mitigates raidwide damage on behalf of the healer. There are so many safeguards here that it really doesn't matter who your supports are.

A lot of this redundancy is apparent in your toolkits as well. Do you really need so many support and defensive options, when everyone else in the team is packing their own self heals and shields? You're stuffed full of so many 'just in case' GCD heals and defensives, that you don't have room for an actual rotation. And even if you did have a rotation, you can't hold a candle to a real DPS in terms of value.

DPS is relatively well preserved, by contrast. If anything, there's no longer an overlap between the damage output that a support is capable of doing relative to a pure DPS, like there was in Heavensward. And I think that's where a lot of the frustration comes from. You've lost a lot of your support value, but gained next to nothing in terms of DPS impact.

When you put this all together, you can see the design direction. I don't agree with it personally, but we've been going full steam ahead on this since Stormblood. It would be great if you manage to change it. But in the interim, you need to make your own mind about whether you want to be valued more for your talents as a player.

[CaptainLagbeard]

One thread that was a thing some time back was a petition to get Yoshi-P to play a healer (for a year)... Maybe sentiment needs to come back and maybe the community managers that should theoretically be around could toss that sentiment towards the entire combat design team... Make them all take a healer from a fresh start all the way to the end of 6.55.
See what they think about the healer gameplay.

[ForsakenRoe]

I think part of the problem is that people come in here and see the title asking for a rotation, then they immediately jump to assume that what we want is a full-blown MNK or BLM rotation when that couldn't be further from the truth.

I LOVE when my criticisms of the role are dismissed because people hear 'I'd like a bit more of an in-depth rotation for the inevitable downtime we'll have in all levels of content' and they respond with one of the following tired lines:

- You want healer to be as complicated as BLM while also having to heal??!?!? (No I would like something akin to WAR or nu-PLD)
- We don't need more damage buttons, we need more damage taken to heal (As much as this sounds great, Abyssos existed. Also, it doesn't really solve lower content like EX roulette without gating less-skilled players)
- You should just play DPS if you want to do damage so much (No, I enjoy the split responsibilities of 'keep team alive' and 'help team meet enrage check'. Also, if every healer went to DPS like this, queues would grind to a halt)

They set up strawmen to argue against because they cannot argue against the truth and win. Healer, as a role, is not as engaging as it could be, and it does not take a BLM rotation to make it so. Just adding back staggered DOT timers/CDs, with 2/3 additional buttons added for that purpose, would go a massive way to helping this issue. WHM example, as it stands, we press 18 Glares a minute, 2 Dias, 3 Lilies and a Misery. Add a new 15s CD GCD (call it Water/Banish), and change Dia down to 12s duration (making it feel more 'bursty' with potency adjustment as needed), and suddenly you change it to 11 Glares, 5 Dias, 4 Banish's, 3 Lilies and a Misery. A 35%ish reduction in 'press Glare' per minute.

Similar with SCH, keep Bio as a 30s DOT sure, but we could have Miasma back as a 24s DOT with an initial cast time, and ShadowFlare as a 15s AOE ground effect. And the potency on SF could be tuned in such a way that it is a gain in AOE, but not to spam (for example, if AOW is 170, SF could be 100p, plus 50 per tick, for a total of 350), which would also allow for the button to pull double-duty and spice up the onebutton AOE rotation as well

[Niroken]

One thread that was a thing some time back was a petition to get Yoshi-P to play a healer (for a year)... Maybe sentiment needs to come back and maybe the community managers that should theoretically be around could toss that sentiment towards the entire combat design team... Make them all take a healer from a fresh start all the way to the end of 6.55.
See what they think about the healer gameplay.

Game developers are notoriously stubborn. The best case would be that they get to 6.55 and say that the style of play isn't for them personally. They just have to look at the numbers and see that Healers outnumber tanks in terms of queue times just to come to the conclusion that healers enjoy that play style because... they keep playing healer. When healers get to tank level queues to where it's actually a problem, then adjustments would be made.

[Shougun]

Game developers are notoriously stubborn. The best case would be that they get to 6.55 and say that the style of play isn't for them personally. They just have to look at the numbers and see that Healers outnumber tanks in terms of queue times just to come to the conclusion that healers enjoy that play style because... they keep playing healer. When healers get to tank level queues to where it's actually a problem, then adjustments would be made.

"You think you do, but you don't"