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

[Colt47]

@Colt47 First of all, regarding this "If all the content has to work for both healers, what is the bloody point of having a regen healer and a big spells healer? Identity? So one is always going to be an enfeebled mess of a job while the other is the one everyone uses depending on the fight?" - I don't see this as quite pertinent to the thread, which relates more to healer QOL during downtime, however I would still like to speak to it. Perhaps your comment has more to do with your experience in other games, however aside from relatively brief briefs , which were reverted - I don't believe than any of the healers was ever in a state that they could not function. Now, that does NOT mean that some parties had the perception that another healer was weaker- if for example, an AST could hit macrocosmos and heal up a party , and a WHM could do so as well, but required more skills - but a party was under the belief that only an AST could heal?

You also seem to have contradicted yourself somewhat in the pure/shield healers. There had been quite a bit of discussion regarding where the split was worth it, I would agree that the the pure/shield healers are not very distinct. I would disagree that "one is worse in every way to the other" , that definitely should be placed in context first of all, then I would say that there are arguments to make for stating that the best combo is 2 shield healers > one pure and one shield > 2 pure.

Finally, I'm not sure, in the context of this thread, of what you're trying to state by "what the point would be to have a strictly worse option in healing in a game if it were put intentionally in the game. Despite the fact that people might think this is some mistake on the designers part, there is a reason originally to do this."

What "worse option" in healer job design, when we are discussing what we see as improvements? Secondly, while I would credit that game developers would have a reason for job changes, do you believe that game developers are incapable of making mistakes?

The reason shield healers are worse than pure healers is that this starts going into the direction of the lily bell problem where they have to design content to justify having super shields. And then because they justify the super shields, it forces problems on pure healers that then require their job to have shield spells to some degree. So now buttons start showing up on these jobs that were not related to their original designation (Beni on WHM for example), because they have to at least have a minimal amount of shields support in case two pure healers are chosen.

And now what happens if they want to design it so that they want to enforce one shield healer and one pure healer? They weaken the healing on the shield healers, but then there still is a need for everyone to keep themselves alive in normal content and they can't put more healing on the shield healers, so they move more healing to the other jobs in the group.

And then we get to the point now where if a fight doesn't have any kind of attack that does damage to everyone all the time, people can literally go through some fights with no healers at all, and the only reason healers exist is to fill requirements on a duty finder list.

It's like a domino effect that just keeps going to justify a design decision that started as a simple want for diversity. Healers can be different in some ways in terms of cast speed or which spells do more healing, but fundamentally if someone removes the capacity to heal from a specific kind of healer it still has to go somewhere and that somewhere has to work in a format with 4 man teams.

Edit: Now that I'm thinking on it, because everyone has self healing they got forced into making lethal attacks where having some kind of supplemental healing doesn't make fights too easy at the high end. So in reality, the Mits matters is a design choice because everyone got self healing to make up for the lack of healing power on shield healers, which was brought about by trying to differentiate shield healers from pure healers, which forced pure healers to adopt having shields, because the newer fight design requires shields to survive... and also everyone had to have a lily bell equivalent because multi-hit attacks that only exist in newer designed content.

... you know I really wish they would stop trying to invent reasons to add more buttons to jobs and just have an end goal. No one is getting a better DPS rotation if they have to keep adding stuff to fights that need new unique healing buttons (and arguably, the multi hit thing didn't need lily bell they just forced it on us). Like it isn't just having more attack buttons on healers, they could have more scalable fights if the shields were just something DPS and tanks had, and healing was specifically a healer thing so the developers have a much easier time controlling difficulty. This whole mit matters thing feels like them trying to flatline and cover up all the mistakes.

[Tigore]

As for the new Cure 3 idea from Roe to halve MP cost when the WHM's own Medica 2 HoTs are present, this presents an interesting scenario. Even if it's only the melee DPS getting it for a 4 man or 8 man, it might actually be worth using still for casuals due to the half mana cost. New melee players tend to have a higher chance to take damage than new ranged players anyhow. If the BLM is still all the way to Narnia and refuses to teleport into melee range, I will still have to consider using Regen on them if they get hit. If they wanted to join in the half cost Cure 3 party, they should have teleported in, lol.

[IDontPetLalas]

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... you know I really wish they would stop trying to invent reasons to add more buttons to jobs and just have an end goal. No one is getting a better DPS rotation if they have to keep adding stuff to fights that need new unique healing buttons (and arguably, the multi hit thing didn't need lily bell they just forced it on us). Like it isn't just having more attack buttons on healers, they could have more scalable fights if the shields were just something DPS and tanks had, and healing was specifically a healer thing so the developers have a much easier time controlling difficulty. This whole mit matters thing feels like them trying to flatline and cover up all the mistakes.

I'd rather not get into the merits of the pure vs shield healers split, as we have at least one other thread specifically on that.

However, where you get into "No one is getting a better DPS rotation if they have to keep adding stuff to fights that need new unique healing buttons" - I don't recall any fight since the split that any of the healers could not handle, so I don't see why there is an assumption that this would occur in the future.

Now, if you wanted to say "I would like some changes to DPS skills, and look at the heals that tanks have,", I would suggest scrolling up a bit as there are probably a few better posts than mine that a number of people have made suggesting this.

Final point- the scope of this (for me) isn't limited to "4 man teams". It's 8 person raids, it's alliances, it's solo content, it's all levels of difficulty. I would want healers to be engaging in all types of content.