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

[IDontPetLalas]

The problem I'm seeing with healers is they bolted this newer OGCD healing system that doesn't really care about MP onto what is left of a system entirely based around MP, so there's two ways to do healing and both are valid except in terms of dps output. WHM and Scholar aren't even playing the same game at low levels as they are at high levels.

The rotting, seething corpse of pre-ARR white mage picked away by vultures, with shiny bolted on cybernetic parts stuck to it with lily scribbles all over and a few air fresheners so no one notices the smell.

Also, remember people: They could have fixed FOUR jobs this coming expansion, but instead they fixed two and gave us Viper and Pictomancer. Imagine what possibilities could have existed in the wonderful alternate reality of fixing stuffs.

You're being optimistic, aren't you? Well, that's nice to see. This is what, the 4th rework for AST? Time will tell.

[Colt47]

You're being optimistic, aren't you? Well, that's nice to see. This is what, the 4th rework for AST? Time will tell.

Yoshi P and team can save us.

Honestly, WHM is fine around Shadowbringers, it's when we get to endwalker that it becomes a clown car of sorts. The main problem stems from the "mit matters" mindset and health regeneration during combat. The entire reason that white mage got Liturgy of the bell and Aqua Veil is because Liturgy is meant to heal up the huge amount of damage that is dealt when a mitigation fails in normal content, or when someone succeeds on a mitigation in hard content. Aqua veil is there specifically for end game content to act as mit #2 on extremely damaging attacks for tanks.

This is great except that our kit as a whm is built around pure healing and health regeneration. The design of the end game doesn't really work with health regeneration because a lot of the situations are binary in function at the extreme: People either live, or they just flat out die from failing a mechanic. Even in the easier expert roulette dungeons I watched a rdm just get instant KOed with I think 1 or 2 vuln stacks. In Shadowbringers things work beautifully because people would get vuln stacks, but become harder to keep up and require more skills to get the same result: Without vuln I can use instant cast regens or just lily power to keep someone up. If someone starts getting vuln stacks I got to start doing more spam and it hurts the damage output as basic regeneration can't keep up with the damage they are taking.

And then the other problem that healers have is the leveling experience. The reason that we have cure and cure II is because of legacy content requiring them to keep people up, and for a good portion of the early leveling experience white mage doesn't even have a regen spell nor do they have any AOE heals. Hauke Manor you're spending your entire time with a tank multi-pulling pack mobs going between cure II and aero spam while making sure you're MP isn't draining into oblivion. For shield healers they are basically not even using shields much at that level over just spamming cures like the whm.

The shield healers have the problem that they start out with strong heals and then get nerfed as they level up and are forced to use more and more shields to keep people up. This sounds like a "well duh, its a shield healer" situation, but this is a rather unnatural evolution for something doing the exact same thing as a whm. And as DRK clearly shows, unless tank design takes into account that one set of healers is built to heal and the other is just there to supplement their own recovery skills, it results in a biased game situation where one type of tank and healer is just over all superior.

Also going to state this flat out that "Mit Matters" is nothing new. They had it since shadowbringers and even before that in end game content. I think the only thing they did this expansion was try to expand that into the normal leveling content, which partially succeeded but it diminished the value of skills that people literally are using for the majority of their leveling experience. It's like 1-80 is a different universe from 81-90.

[ty_taurus]

There’s nothing inherently wrong with Aquaveil, but it’s also very redundant with Benison. Mitigation and barriers are different, and each has their own advantage and disadvantage, but the objective of both veil and Benison is the same: soak a portion of the damage intended for the tank. So why do we have two?

[Colt47]

There’s nothing inherently wrong with Aquaveil, but it’s also very redundant with Benison. Mitigation and barriers are different, and each has their own advantage and disadvantage, but the objective of both veil and Benison is the same: soak a portion of the damage intended for the tank. So why do we have two?

A lot of the issues with the skill bloat could be solved without changing much. They mostly have to tell the players what abilities are legacy ones that they don't expect them to be using at the later levels and suggest the ability to use in its place. The community will always find out what is the most efficient but informing people "hey, I know you have cure but beyond this point it is highly encouraged to use X instead" would be a life saver for setting up hot bars.

Like the healer troubles are way different from Dark Knights issue where they are just missing something they need in their kit but have an ability bloat issue.

[Mithron]

The only two jobs in this game I feel like have any button bloat issues are PLD and AST, both of which are really a non-issue IMO. Particularly with PLD, you rarely press most of their buttons anyway. I felt like HW had a lot more bloat issues since there were a lot more dots and OGCDs that did damage, with cross class skills like Mercy Stroke and more.

[Merrigan]

The only two jobs in this game I feel like have any button bloat issues are PLD and AST, both of which are really a non-issue IMO. Particularly with PLD, you rarely press most of their buttons anyway. I felt like HW had a lot more bloat issues since there were a lot more dots and OGCDs that did damage, with cross class skills like Mercy Stroke and more.

Uh... You rarely press PLD buttons ?

Most of mine are always used. The exception being "passe d'arme" (the skill where you have wings behind your back, to protect your party).

[Colt47]

DRK is more of a problem with adding what they need would give them too many buttons to work with so they'd have to compress something to make room. They just don't know what they want to do with DRK, honestly.

[Supersnow845]

I feel like most classes suffer more from “APM bloat” or “redundant actions” bloat than they do true button bloat

Classes like DRK, NIN and AST suffer from APM bloat where they have messy overfull burst windows full of actions you only press during the burst window and then they are relatively boring outside of that (this is actually the one pro I give modern SMN, it never has a part of its rotation that actively feels weak like doing your 123 on NIN does)

PLD especially more so suffers from redundant actions bloat (but I could also point out the bension/aquaveil problem) where it just has alot of actions that while doing kinda different things all lead to the same result (not dying), clemency, intervention, cover, passage, shield lob they are all just kinda there

I’d say the only class right now suffering from true button bloat is SCH because SCH equals AST and PLD for most actions but all of SCH’s actions are actually unique and useful and it doesn’t have a bursty burst window you have to press 85 buttons in. Even if you deleted what most consider SCH’s 2 most useless actions (blessing and protraction) it still has close to the most actions of any class and beyond those two it becomes harder and harder to justify which action to delete

[ty_taurus]

I'd argue every job has unnecessary bloat by having entirely segregated actions for AOE in a game where AOE is the most unimportant factor of combat that is almost never utilized beyond "here's a group of trash enemies or adds for you to burn down." If the game was constantly pitting us against multiple bosses that had more interesting movement patterns that made AOE advantageous at different moments, and that AOE was actually a meaningful DPS gain on 2 enemies for every job, it'd be a different story.

[Supersnow845]

I'd argue every job has unnecessary bloat by having entirely segregated actions for AOE in a game where AOE is the most unimportant factor of combat that is almost never utilized beyond "here's a group of trash enemies or adds for you to burn down." If the game was constantly pitting us against multiple bosses that had more interesting movement patterns that made AOE advantageous at different moments, and that AOE was actually a meaningful DPS gain on 2 enemies for every job, it'd be a different story.

On the other hand just making you do your single target rotation with AOE falloff in dungeons would make dungeons even less interesting, at least classes like BLM have actively interesting AOE rotations, I don’t want even more reason to have to press broil

I’d agree that more bosses need AOE phases (though they would have to better balance AOE because classes both do wildly different damage and not all classes start AOE’ing at the same number of enemies) but removing AOE buttons to just have broil have 40% falloff feels like the worst circle of hell