Do healers actually want a more complex damage rotation?

[Ramiee]

Pretty sure cleric stance was turned into just a damage buff in SB, while the stance dancing was a thing up through HW. The spell upgrades being separate also was a pre-SB thing. I think the only thing WHM had outside its current kit in SB was AeroIII.

yeah i dont remember stormblood that well but even then Cleric stance was controversal in SB, even if it was just a damage buff. I didn't heal much in SB so most of my memories come from HW. So WHM lost all of those strong attacks after HW lol?
Seriously SB already simplified damage dealing in healers so much that they really didnt need to do ShB role rework lmao.

[KisaiTenshi]

yeah i dont remember stormblood that well but even then Cleric stance was controversal in SB, even if it was just a damage buff. I didn't heal much in SB so most of my memories come from HW. So WHM lost all of those strong attacks after HW lol?
Seriously SB already simplified damage dealing in healers so much that they really didnt need to do ShB role rework lmao.

Cleric Stance in ARR, literately swapped MND and INT. So you would go from doing 100% healing to 5% healing. There was a recast delay, so the entire argument against cleric stance was that people doing it are not only contributing nothing to DPS, but being in cleric stance was proof you were not healing.

Tanks in ARR had to maintain enmity. If you cast Medica 2, you ALWAYS ripped the enmity away from the tank. You were punished for overhealing. If a tank tied to stance dance in ARR, you, the healer would keep ending up dead unless you were to stop casting entirely before they did it.

Suffice it to say, "stance dance" was not an intended mechanic in the first place, and the game is better off without it, and anyone saying otherwise, was not playing Tank enough in ARR PUG's to see it.

It is honestly easier to say that mechanically speaking, the game was not designed for you to stance dance, and doing so was a compromise so that healers could do the non-dungeon content, and so tanks could off-tank in two-tank content. If the developers had know players would be so toxic and abusive about DPS as healer or tank, they would have never had the feature carried over from 1.20:

ncreases potency of attack spells by 20% and reduces potency of healing spells by 20%. Effect fades upon reuse.

ARR (Recast Time: 30 seconds):

Swaps current INT and MND attribute ratings, while increasing potency of attack spells by 10% and reducing potency of healing spells by 20%. Effect ends upon reuse.

Stormblood (recast time 90 seconds):

Increases potency of attack magic by 5%. Duration: 15s. Recast: 90s.

Like, quite literately the "swaps int and mnd" part of the ARR version is why it was such a problem, because as gear creeped up, the gap between INT and MND grew. So in level 15 content, that healing loss might not be as noticed, but by the time you got to the level 50 content if you stopped healing for the 35 seconds needed to turn it on and off, you usually wiped the party.

The content was not balanced for healers to DPS in the dungeon content, and has never been so. The overworld and the solo story content assumes a DPS role, that is why we had it, because otherwise, doing any quest in the overworld took 10's of minutes rather than 10's of seconds. I did the entire 1-50 MSQ without using cleric stance, imagine now if fighting a single group of 3 mobs took as long as fighting Zenos. That is what it was like. Yes, you could use cleric stance in the overworld quests, but then you'd usually be retrying them a lot because the damage output, even in cleric stance wasn't high enough to kill a monster before it would kill you, so you would instead not use it, and basically alternate between cure on yourself and stone on the mob. if you made the mistake of using cleric stance, you couldn't heal yourself worth beans. You had to use Repose when there was more than one monster. That is how the game wanted you to do it. The developers didn't design the MSQ in a way that a healer could get through it without grinding levequests for far better gear than needed for the quest.

In a way it's just amazing that the developers thought it was a good idea at all.

[A_moth_called_rose]

Yes, I do. Bring back Shadowflare, bring back Miasma and bane, hell I'd kill to have Mummification in PvE. Give us back our silence. I wanna be something more than a ruinbot and have more things to do with my aetherflow offensively and have utility options that go beyond a healing amplifier and a shield spreader.

[Azurarok]

In a way it's just amazing that the developers thought it was a good idea at all.

The old cleric stance existed because all offensive spells used INT while healing used MND up through HW, but they both now scale off MND so that version just straight up won't work in the current game.

Lost Seraph Strike in Bozja however grants a version of Cleric Stance which increases damage dealt by 60% and reduces healing by 60% for 15s. Obviously it only works because Bozja is designed for non-standard comps and I wouldn't ask for it in normal content, but it was a blast to use (especially when Thin Air was on a timer).

At any rate I don't think there's many folks who actually want the old cleric stance back, and that's part of why the Stormblood kits are usually brought up.

[NobleWinter]

I want more DPS abilities. I played SCH in ARR and kept playing it thru every expansion. I miss Shadowflare, Miasma, Miasma II, Bane, and a second fairy with support abilities like Fey Wind. I solo healed extremes with no problem being distracted by extra buttons back then and I'm a much better player now. There needs to be a healer with more to do than spam Broil until I get bored and lose focus. I cleared an Ultimate and I still hate how boring healing is. I'm struggling to find joy in healing and I'm one of the people who gravitates toward healing and support in every game.

[Magikazam]

Hopefully this wont come across as argumentative because I'm just genuinely curious if the majority of people want a more complex damage rotation on healers? Or is it just the case they want more difficulty and identity for the role?

Many people are noticing the fact we have a single button or two to press for a large portion of the fight (for damage) and apparently the solution to that is to make it more complex instead. I think the real solution is fixing the fact we have so much down-time where we're just expected to damage.

A lot of hard content can be done with a single healer despite having two, meaning a lot of content has double the healers it actually requires. I feel like this shows healing itself needs to become more difficult, perhaps with actual 'rotations' given to healing itself or more difficult encounters.

It wont be enjoyable when players taking avoidable damage becomes a frustration for healers because we now need to take time away from our damage rotations. We have enough unique damage jobs in the game that a healer shouldn't be furthered into being another damage job with some slight sustain and healing capabilities.

It depend on who you ask. Personally I think better rotation is the best way to fix the main healer problem whitout altering all the already existing boss fight. Healer kit are made to be healbot in a game where mechanic kill in 1 or 2 shots and where there a lack of overall sustained damage.

[aiqa]

For rotations I think at least WHM doesn't need additional buttons. First it needs to make good use of it's existing buttons. If you have 5 buttons (6 technically if you include heals needed to build blood lillies) you use for single target dps, they should be able to create something that doesn't end up with using 1 button 70% of the fight.

I don't want a complex rotation in the sense of dps job rotations. But I don't want all the non-Glare buttons on long cooldowns.

[ForsakenRoe]

For rotations I think at least WHM doesn't need additional buttons. First it needs to make good use of it's existing buttons. If you have 5 buttons (6 technically if you include heals needed to build blood lillies) you use for single target dps, they should be able to create something that doesn't end up with using 1 button 70% of the fight.

I don't want a complex rotation in the sense of dps job rotations. But I don't want all the non-Glare buttons on long cooldowns.

This is my issue with Glare 4. It's cool that we get it, but it's 3 actions that aren't Glare 3, per 2min. If it were introduced as, say, a 15s CD action, that'd break up the 11 Glares in a row that we currently do into two lots of 4/5 (depending on which has the Dia refresh with it). Lowering Dia's duration to make it feel more 'bursty' would help break the Glare blocks up even further. In fact, I've done maths previously and worked out that, if you did have a new action at 15s, and made Dia 12s duration, then you'd reduce the number of Glares per minute from 18 out of a possible 24 GCDs (75%) to 11 out of 24 (46ish%). The longest block of 'back to back Glare 3 casts' would be FOUR, instead of our current ELEVEN.

I agree, we don't need overly complex damage rotations for healer. But 'press Dia every 5th GCD, press 15s CD every 6th GCD' isn't exactly pushing the boundaries of complexity, IMO. It's well within the acceptable 'complexity level' for a healer to have

[Selvokaz]

i think what people really want is something to do while being a healer, tanks tank even when they dps, dps does dps and now can sometimes heal or raise, or buff the party, but a healer only slows the party down when they have to heal because they aren't doing dps, and their dps isn't really all that interesting, so yeah that seems like the jest of the issue.

[Sylvain]

It depend on who you ask. Personally I think better rotation is the best way to fix the main healer problem whitout altering all the already existing boss fight. Healer kit are made to be healbot in a game where mechanic kill in 1 or 2 shots and where there a lack of overall sustained damage.

And it feels so great when there are!
Like I did the lv 100 dungeon where [big unnamed monster to avoid spoiler] keep doing AoE (trash pack). The DPS were so bad that those small but constant AoE did force me to use litterally my whole kit before I started using gcd heal IN DUNGEON!!!
I was like "wooo.... can't believe I had to do 3 aspected helios here" (the dps were panicking, instead of hitting the trash they were trying to run away from the aoe dmg... took forever to kill xD)