Latest Official Developer Statements About Healer DPS?

[Melichoir]

This is a misunderstanding that ....next safe to.

I do remember given the time period mentioned that dots had issues back then with lining up nicely among other things, and that being partially the reason devs moved away from dots. That said, what you are mentioning here is more meta complexity, that can probably be achieved with smaller fixes than whole reworks. It's not really a 'rotation' in the sense of other classes, like that of Monk, Sam, BLM, and etc. Granted I think stuff that has meta complexity is definitely more feasible for the devs to accomplish, and I personally like complexity in this regard because its interesting.

Healing IS OGCD based as it stands. ....to be a viable solution to the issue

I agree mostly with how healing currently is but there is a bit of a caveat to this? You could technically heal a fight with just oGCDs if coordination is superb (so both healers work well, as long as proper mitigation and no one taking excessive damage). In organized statics I can see that happening, but in PF....

That might be why things are as they are now, because it requires more coordination you need more robust healing options that are semi redundant because you have to factor in other players and the mistakes they may make much more than any other role[/QUOTE]

You have to explain to me how anyone not doing their.... say they have a leg to stand on?

The role of healer is a bit more unique in that, unlike other jobs where their rotation is pretty much their own business, healers business is that of other players. So if you had a rotation as a healer, how well that rotation goes will become some what more dependant on your party members doing their stuff to a T and not getting killed or taking excessive damage. So imagine player feelings when people cant do their healer dps rotation cause DPS eat pancakes or make mistakes.

First, drop that [I]"if you're trying to increase healer DPS output....... standard is sickening.

That example is not exactly great. All it does is essentially assume that "If something is more complex, it is more interesting and fulfilling." But that is an assumption, and is ultimately missing the 'reward' aspect that isnt subjective.

If you wanted a better example, it should be more like this:

50 + 50 = 100

50+x(2y/(x+45))^2 = 10,000

The complexity added is rewarded with increased output. This is an objective meaningful increase to complexity that people will naturally find more fair (if, the effort to get the increase is 'reasonable'). This is kind of important because, being frank, the example you showed is actually a nerf, because to achieve the same results, you now must do way more work. People will not generally find that change justified. You and a few others may on a personal level like the change cause its harder, but most players wont see it that way. They will complain and ask for reversion.

But even then, just consider the added complexity is a reward in of itself and people do accept that. That added complexity still comes at a cost to the game design, no matter how you slice it. It can be things like button bloat problems, balance issues, changes in the player mindset when playing the job, and so forth. Those are things devs have to consider before making changes. It is exactly why they havent settled on one design direction or another, and its not an easy problem to solve.

Lastly roles not doing their intended jobs is actually a problem that is worth pointing out. Tanks refusing to mitigate cause "gotta get my deeps", or healers not ressing cause "no swift cast" actually illustrates problems with player mentality when it comes to their roles, where the focus of their play becomes to much about DPS. Yeah, tanks need to be mitigating, and healers need to be ressing, even if it means a DPS loss because their roll is supposed to do those things. Why, then, would it be a good idea to encourage more of problematic behavior just because other roles have that issue? That really doesn't make sense to me.

Not a healer......as a response to this point.

THe problem with the proposed solution is that it ultimately is no different than pressing 1 button. Consider it mechanically: What is the difference between 1,1,1,1,1,1, and 1,2,3,1,2,3? You arent really adding complexity, partially because the problem with the proposed solution is there is no 'punishment' for breaking rotation. Youre just delaying it technically so you can do role specific actions that you are there for. There has to be something that gives a reason why spamming 1,2,3 (as an example) is more interesting an option other than you have more buttons to push that accomplish the exact same thing as pressing 1 button. And that complexity has to be meaningful, meaning it should come with 'punishments' for not doing it optimally.

[Maltothoris]

Have you not seen what SE has done to make sure that rotations aren't messed up anymore? Melee and tank range attacks don't interrupt the combo anymore and same goes for Holy Spirit and Atonement and who said anything about a 123 rotation? Why not have something like BLM lite or RDM lite?

[ty_taurus]

If you wanted a better example, it should be more like this:

50 + 50 = 100

50+x(2y/(x+45))^2 = 10,000

The complexity added is rewarded with increased output. This is an objective meaningful increase to complexity that people will naturally find more fair (if, the effort to get the increase is 'reasonable'). This is kind of important because, being frank, the example you showed is actually a nerf, because to achieve the same results, you now must do way more work. People will not generally find that change justified. You and a few others may on a personal level like the change cause its harder, but most players wont see it that way. They will complain and ask for reversion.

Um... The current tank balance would say otherwise:

[Supersnow845]

Um... The current tank balance would say otherwise:

The tanks are so hilariously balanced you almost get punished for picking a more complex class or one that has a worse invuln

But WAR isn’t allowed to be bad at anything

[Melichoir]

Um... The current tank balance would say otherwise:

I wasnt initially discussing comparisons between classes cause that starts involving a whole slew of nuances that arent exactly relevant to what I was trying to say about the example and generally the overall approach to making a healer class more complex.

What I was saying was increasing complexity to achieve the exact same goal is not enough in of itself. That isnt meaningful in an objective sense. There has to be a tangible reward for the increase in complexity from a previous iteration. A tangible reward could be an increase in dps, but could be other things that give its complexity an edge over less complex iterations. So if a healer increases complexity with some rotation on top of keeping all other aspects intact only for it to achieve the exact same end result as its previous incarnation that spammed 1 all day long, the change isnt really justified as a positive. It is, in fact a defacto a nerf to the class. One many people will not outright accept, especially if the level of complexity is substantially increased.

If we were to talk about complexity between classes within a role, this just goes back to what I mentioned about the problem with making changes: Added complexity comes with cost. Balancing, as an example, becomes substantially more difficult to do if the goal is to keep the relative output of all classes within a role 'viable'. Its actually easier to dumb things down and homogenize than to add complexity to maintain balance. So even if they want to make healers have a rotation, they have to consider balance as a result. A way this plays out is actually pretty easy to see: If WHM, for example, had a pretty damn complex rotation that is significantly harder than all the other 3 healers to achieve the same result, it will likely see LESS play overall from the player base because people will optimize into a class that better bang for their buck.

[ty_taurus]

The tanks are so hilariously balanced you almost get punished for picking a more complex class or one that has a worse invuln

But WAR isn’t allowed to be bad at anything

Certainly not perfect, but also not a disaster either. Which is why I find the 100 vs 10000 comparison to be highly uncharitable.

In general, balancing around the difficulty of a class/character in a game is not only common, but fairly standard practice, so the sentiment does make sense, but we're ignoring a lot of nuance to that concept. First and foremost is we need to consider how difficult is the job actually and what is the general performance expectation that we have of the average player in different settings? (Like if Sage is our complex DPS healer, how does the average dungeon player perform? How does the average alliance raider perform? How does the average savage raider perform? etc.) What you end up with, when balanced well, is a job that can outperform an easier class/character to some extent (i.e. without invalidating the alternatives), but also can underperform when played incorrectly. In other words, we have a higher maximum threshold, but a wider swing in terms of performance levels, and that's perfectly okay, as we see with Black Mage for example. Black Mage has the widest swing of all jobs in the game by a mile, and yet, its balance is rarely an issue (with caster DPS the issue is more on SE's insistence on massively overtuned utility tax on Summoner and Red Mage. Things like utility tax or mobility tax are fine for balance, but SE does not seem capable of comprehending how to hold back when it comes to DPS taxes).

tl;dr: Our hypothetical "complex" healer (and I use the term "complex" loosely) may have a higher maximum DPS output, but would also have a lower minimum--a wider swing.

Also, something to consider is DPS vs utility. Something I've said before is that every healer should have a unique advantage that gives them a different angle to approach more challenging content with. Scholar already has this in the form of Expedient, and Astrologian arguably has this in Macrocosmos being able to delete certain types of healing checks (if things like Reaper's Toll were more frequent, that could be Astrologian's niche). As long as White Mage can be allowed to have its own form of utility, like the example of float I've given elsewhere in the past or something else entirely, then Sage's niche could also just be an extra couple steps higher of DPS output, not unlike the concept of Black Mage.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

[...]

You see, I don't really disagree vehemently against many of your points. However the fact remains that neither the changes they've imparted into the green role nor their related past statements had made any sense.

Why say "healer DPS isn't expected" while also pruning the complexities away & creating fights like E8S that clearly expects healer's contribution? To add insult to the injury, have they ever given back anything in return after those pruning? (rhetoric)
Why say "we want healer to heal" but also keeps adding buttons that specifically to make healers heal less or sometimes none at all (aka button that literally created to solve a very specific mechanic)? Lilybell & Panhaima are the biggest offender in this category. Multi-hit instances are nice to have, but do you know why healing through Styx in Zodiark Normal was more fun as a WHM than SGE? Because I can make that in-combat decision to where to keep my 2-3 lilies so I don't need to hardcast Medica II/Cure III, drift Assize, and I don't have Lilybell at that level. What's wrong with SGE? Just Panhaima+Kerachole and Dosis away(??????).

Make it make sense, small indie company. They're clearly capable of making things better, they just refuse to for whatever reason.

[...]Why, then, would it be a good idea to encourage more of problematic behavior just because other roles have that issue? That really doesn't make sense to me.

This goes both ways. ARR - StB healer dps buttons would like to have a word with this particular sentence.

You (general you) give a 1 2 1 1 1 1 rotation to a healer, then suddenly newbie & scared healer are shocked that healer needs to contribute dps because just how easy it is to achieve about 60% of a full fledge DPS job's contribution. This is exactly what's happening after ShB pruning.
You give back old Cleric Stance to healers, then suddenly newbie or scared healer can remain within Cleric Stance to heal safely because everybody knows the risk just isn't worth it if they can't pull it off. This was a common occurrence in the olden days.

[Somnolence]

As somebody that enjoys leveling all jobs to max and playing all of them, healers are my least played.

Why? Because its the only role where your gameplay is tied to party incompetence, meaning the amount you heal depends on how much tanks suck and dps ignore mechanics. If party is competent then the gameplay loop is quite boring one button spam.

For non-static play this is toxic relationship. Meanwhile if healing in statics its essentially "optimizing the fun away" as you minimize healing you do for your one button spam.

At least with tanks you have some semblance of rotation so after optimizing mits you still have gameplay loop to keep brain engaged.

[ForsakenRoe]

THe problem with the proposed solution is that it ultimately is no different than pressing 1 button. Consider it mechanically: What is the difference between 1,1,1,1,1,1, and 1,2,3,1,2,3? You arent really adding complexity, partially because the problem with the proposed solution is there is no 'punishment' for breaking rotation. Youre just delaying it technically so you can do role specific actions that you are there for. There has to be something that gives a reason why spamming 1,2,3 (as an example) is more interesting an option other than you have more buttons to push that accomplish the exact same thing as pressing 1 button. And that complexity has to be meaningful, meaning it should come with 'punishments' for not doing it optimally.

And the easiest way to show how bad a path that logic follows, is to just ask the opposite. Let's say you're right, what IS the difference between 111111 and 123123? Then the question is: Why do healers get the former, but tanks and DPS are given the latter? Given there's 'no difference in complexity really' between the two, why do DPS not all have 11111 as their rotation, like healers? Why do Tanks get to have new buttons like Confiteor, Primal Rend or Double Down each expansion? Surely for a DPS, just pressing True Thrust or Hakaze over and over is all they need, with the correct balance applied? Or for Tanks, all they really need is Heavy Swing, Overpower for AOE, and Tomahawk for picking up adds from range, right?

But we have been through that particular point a million times already, to the point where there really ought to be an FAQ of the most debunked points somewhere. We don't actually think Tanks and DPS should have their gameplay rendered so bland. We just want to know why Healers are subject to the decision, when they are equally 'not DPS' as another role who DOES have such gameplay (Tanks). If we had something akin to WAR for healers, but a little more simplified, then these complaints wouldn't be happening in such numbers. Consider WAR, you have Eye combo to maintain a buff, Path combo for filler, a 0-100 gauge that you can spend on a big hit (Fell Cleave), a move to generate 50 gauge (Infuriate), a 60s burst move for '3 gauge spenders for free, plus a big hit too (Primal Rend)', an OGCD (Upheaval), and a 3 charge OGCD (Onslaught). If you remove the 1-2 part of the combos, Eye is like Dia, and Path is like Glare on WHM. From there, what else do we have as WHM that compares? Orogeny, the AOE version of Upheaval, could be likened to Assize, but it's 30s to Assize's 40. POM, our burst window move, is 2min compared to WAR's 1min. Beyond that, there's not really anything else.

That's why I suggested what I did before. The addition of a 0-100 gauge on WHM would add all this extra design space for new moves, like an Infuriate analogue, or the healing move and it's linked 'damage refunds' of Quake, Tornado, Flood, being 'sorta kinda' similar to IR, 3 Fell Cleaves (given that the gauge build rate I had worked out to about 60 gauge per minute, allowing one use per minute roughly in single target).

Btw, I've yet to see a single person who's suggested a healer rework in the healer section of the forums, suggest a hard 1-2-3 combo as part of their idea (hard being 'you must use 1 2 3 in that order, without anything in between that would break the combo'). Usually it's 'soft combos', incentivized by some buff or another that makes a certain order more desirable to use. EG, if you have Glare increase the potency of your next Holy by 30% per stack, then at 4 stacks, Holy becomes a gain over another Glare, making a 'soft combo' of 4 Glares, then a Holy. You could safely interrupt the 4 Glare building phase with a heal, and retain the stacks. Alternatively, the most common thing I've seen (partially because it's what I go with) is to not have combos at all, instead making the 'rotation' based on priority system, more akin to something like BRD or RDM. Where BRD is (at it's absolute simplest) 'Is your DOT up? If no, use it/refresh it, if yes... Is Refulgent procced? If yes, use it, if not use Burst Shot', I would have healers be something like (WHM for example here) 'Is Dia up? If no, use it. If yes, is Banish on CD? If no (it's ready to use), use it. If it's on CD, use Glare'. If you need to heal, you heal, and then go back to the priority system. For example, lets say you need to use Banish, but you need to heal in that GCD. So you would heal, and keep the team alive (as is your role requirement as a healer). Then, you go 'OK damage time' again, but oops, because you had to heal, Dia fell off. So now, you use Dia (because it's higher priority), then Banish, then Glare again. No messing about with combos is needed, we can keep the damage rotation pretty simple to understand without it being 'boring to execute' by just having a few (in this case, two) short CD GCDs. I used Dia at 12s and Banish at 15s as examples. The fact that the two do not have a neatly aligning timer means that you can't just go BDGGGGBDGGGG for the whole fight. If both were 15s, it wouldn't solve much of anything. The fact that the two would drift about within your rotation (in relation to one another, not to your GCD) is what would give it executional depth (or at least, more than it currently has).

This is a video of the idea, of a 12s Dia and 15s Banish, in action. Well, kind of, I had to take creative liberties with the tools available. So it means 'manually refresh Dia at 18s left' and 'use this one Lost Action in Bozja, using the instance timer to track it's 15s CD since the Lost Action itself doesn't have a CD'. And it has a cast time, whereas my version of Banish would be instant (allowing WHM more mobility, and therefore more casual friendly). Regardless, I would hope that, just off of this video demonstration, it's apparent the difference between our current rotation, and what a small change like what I have suggested, could do for our gameplay.

[ty_taurus]

Somehow, we always seem to have to talk about 1-2-3 combos. I don't really understand why we are forced to consider this angle time and time again because healers are casters, not melee, were able to have a wider selection of attack spells in the past that did not include 1-2-3 combos, and literally no one is saying "give healers a 1-2-3 combo and that'll solve the problem," but here we are. Again.

I think people just want me to feel the unrelenting desire to scoop out my own eyes with a spoon and give up on humanity.