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

[ForsakenRoe]

Love typing a whole post debunking the strawman arguments, only for someone to waltz into the conversation and proudly declare 'don't care didn't read, plus ratio' and then immediately go to attack a strawman. And not just any strawman, no, it's the same strawman that's already been beaten to death. People suggest standalone GCDs for healers that work like Sonic Break, or Goring Blade (albeit with a shorter recast like 15s). People suggest shorter DOT durations, so they have to be refreshed more often. People suggest interactions between damage and healing, such as gauges that build from dealing damage, that can then be spent on new healing moves (ok this one is mostly me asking for it). And yet somehow, despite all of this, someone saunters in, completely confident in their take (misinformed as it may be), and hits us for the 5th time this week with 'OH SO YOU WANT 1-2-3 COMBOS ON HEALERS HOW'S THAT GONNA BE LESS BORING THAN 1-1-1?'

Really does feel like a ChatGPT situation

Based on this: https://youtu.be/kAbCjPPS1RQ?si=Kr_iJyIrsdisW9bv&t=165, 5.x was their attempt at increasing healing requirements to keep healers busy

Love this video, because it shows how little Yoshi-P actually understands healer gameplay.

'[Item Level increasing means more HP pool and more healing output]..., and there might be instances where people will have to insert some of the offensive moves, because it does get a little... not stagnant, but... 'you don't know what to do'.'

What offensive moves, you removed most of them. The only thing left to 'weave in' is Glare/Broil/the other two, or our mandated 'once per 30s' DOT which couldn't even be creative enough to have a different duration between the 4 healers. Seriously, FOUR classes and you're telling me nobody at SE could think 'hang on, what if one of them was a number that was not 30'? Also, no, they were right the first time with 'stagnant'.

Rant aside, he's right on one thing: Healing output, and it's difficulty, is intrinsically linked to our item levels, and the content difficulty. So, you cannot make a piece of content 'difficult to heal' and have it stay difficult to heal, unless you prevent Item Level from increasing (eg ultimates), or have the damage increase alongside the Item Level (eg %based damage like the raidwides from E1), which people don't usually take to, because it removes the feeling of 'getting stronger' from gearing. A fight can demand literal 100% uptime on healing from me for the first week of prog, but by the time I'm BIS I'll be spending some GCDs on damage, because what took me 100% GCD healing then would only take me say, 75% of my GCDs with more gear. And my reward for 'being better as a healer', the crux of the issue, is that I have to press Glare more often.

Oh, but apparently we all want 1-2-3 combos on healers (some might, I sure don't as they won't solve anything), or BLM/MNK optimization depth (I don't, as we won't have time to heal), and there's apparently no in-between, no middle ground. Just these two extremes. No, I've said what I'd be happy with. And what I've posted about would be one damage button, one shorter DOT, THREE new healing buttons (gauge spender, AOE lily shield, ST lily shield), a way to have our single target buttons (all three of them, Glare/Dia/the suggested Banish addition) find some use in AOE pulls (to make our AOE be more interesting than 'spam Holy'), and a vastly improved lower-level experience by bringing back some old skills (eg a lower level version of Misery, or Divine Seal upgrading into Temperance). Hilarious that I have asked for (on WHM) 'new buttons to play with, 75% of which is healing tools' and people are foamin' over the 25%. If they saw what I'd do to SGE or AST they'd probably have to go get checked out at A+E