Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[ForsakenRoe]

If I had another damage button in my healer rotation for every time I've read someone say 'go play a DPS then', the rotation for WHM would look more terrifying than that one picture of the 2min loop of the TK MNK rotation from SB

Also, shoutout to 'play another game' if I want more involved damage rotations on healers (note: NOT MORE DAMAGE PER SECOND, just more 'damage buttons to interact with'). How about 'Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood'? Or 'Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward'? We HAD this stuff before, and many believe that its removal in SHB was a step too far in simplification. Just adding 1-2 buttons to each healer, with a 10-15s CD and do 'a little bit more damage than the filler spell' would alleviate the issues quite a lot. Then, it gives SE room to give new things in later expansions. We heard how they gave us Expedient because 'we didn't really know what to do for SCH'. Well, I have to ask: Would they have had something in mind for SCH, if they hadn't removed its DOTs? If they had still kept it as having 2 or 3 DOTs to maintain (depending if we're on about HW ShadowFlare or SB), they could have added... I dunno, how about '60s CD skill whose CD is reduced by 1s each time your DOTs tick'? If they close off a whole room of design space (damage related buttons), then it only makes sense that they'd hit a wall in 'what can we add to the class that is new', which is why we constantly get 'more healing tool' for WHM, for that job they've locked off so many design spaces in pursuit of making it 'the healer that heals really hard', and it doesn't even work, because AST has to be able to do the same healchecks as WHM can. So all that extra healing power is just that: Extra. Unrequired. Not needed.

It's a few pages back now, so I'll relink what I'd do to the healers to start fixing the dreadful downtime. And just to prove that you can make big differences in how the rotation feels with very small changes, here is a video demonstrating only the GCD loop for my 'WHM suggested rotation', where the only differences from 'current gameplay' are that there's a new 15s CD we can use instead of a Glare, and Dia's duration is lowered to 12s (potency would be adjusted to compensate). Or worded slightly differently, 'Banish every 6th GCD, Dia every 5th GCD, otherwise use Glare as filler'. It takes us from 18 Glares a minute (with 2 Dia, 3 Lilies, 1 Misery), to 11 Glares (with 5 Dia, 4 Banish, 3 Lilies, 1 Misery). An 'over 33%' decrease in how often we hit that one Glare button.

If anyone wants to say the solution is that 'we should heal more', I have questions:

- How do you expect us to heal more in harder content, where we're already having to spam Succor and Cure3 to handle healing at certain times for week 1 prog (Harrowing Hell Savage, the 11-hit Styx in Savage)? If the solution is 'heal more often' (eg by having raidwides happen more often), has the potency of skills been considered? EG, we can pump out 4000 potency a minute as WHM by just maintaining 100% uptime on Medica 2. How hard and how fast do we need to be hit to actually challenge our total accessible healing potency?

- If we are forced to heal more, has the increased MP cost per minute of our healing been factored in? If we have to use Medica and Cure2 more often (due to having not-enough Lilies to heal everything without damage loss), has their MP cost been factored in, or are we looking at going OOM without a massive amount of Piety added to our gear, or MP cost adjustments across the board?

- Would the 'increase in healing required' affect casual content like EX roulette? If so, has it been considered how it would affect lower-skilled players, and how many would no longer be able to keep up?

- If the 'increase in healing required' does NOT affect casual content, what is there to make that content more 'engaging' for a higher-skilled player? Or is the 'increase in healing required' solution only a solution to a certain difficulty of content? In which case, how does it 'solve' the problem, when it wouldn't be doing anything to the content that arguably needs 'a solution' the most?

- If people become more practiced at the new healing requirements, what stops them from reaching the current plateau, of 'I have X% of my time spare to DPS, so I'll just DPS during it'? If we go from 70% of our GCDs being damage related to... say, 50%, does that 'solve' the issue? If we are always going to have 'some time to deal damage', what ratio of 'GCDs spent on not-damage' to 'GCDs spent on damage' is the 'fix'? And is this 'fix' still forgiving enough to give time for recovery from mistakes, and forgiving enough to allow for less-skilled players to have breathing room (amount of breathing room dependent on content difficulty level)?

- Going forward, if we cannot have 'more damage buttons in rotation' because that is not our role (just ignore that tanks get new ones every expansion, despite it not being 'their role', I guess? Love double standards), what suggestions of 'new additions to the job' are there for later expansions? Is there any new 'thematic' ways to add new non-damage buttons to the healers that feel unique and novel? If a button adds a 'utility' (eg Expedient), how does said utility's effect balance 'feels good to use' with 'is not so strong that it makes the job mandatory for certain content'?

- Finally, would this 'increase to healing required' be going forward, or retroactively applied to all content? If the former, how will people adjust to a sudden increase of healing required when it has never been asked of them (compared to previous content of the same difficulty level)? If the latter, how much extra dev work has to be done to make sure that the jobs can clear old content, with the new adjusted kits, and the new healing required?

Of the two proposed solutions, of 'add more healing required', or 'add more buttons to damage rotation (keeping damage output roughly the same)', which brings less 'questions to answer' with it?

We have a sort of 'butterfly effect' when it comes to changes like these, so I believe it best to focus on a solution that has less 'butterfly effect', less knock-on issues that arise from solving the base issue. And in that regard, I fully believe that 'add more buttons to damage rotation (keeping damage output roughly the same)' has WAY less 'butterfly effect' attached. You don't have to recheck older content to make sure it's still clearable, you don't have to worry about rebalancing MP costs, you don't have to worry that casual players won't be able to keep up on the sudden new damage intake. The sentiment of 'healers should have to heal more, that's the solution to their boredom' is well meaning, but has not been thought through. It's a 'this feels like the solution', and one that falls apart when faced with numbers, logic, and frankly, common sense