FFXIV Healer Strike and the 'How would you fix it?' line

[Mapleine]

Make healing more involved. I think the concept of Picto mechanics opened up a good way forward for the way spellcasting works in this game.

I think a DPS rotation is a really lame solution, procs maybe but no rotation. Still I'd happily take it over what we have now, HAPPILY, but I'd rather they actually design a healing model and new spell types other than just massive oGCD blasts.

[ForsakenRoe]

I think a DPS rotation is a really lame solution, procs maybe but no rotation.

There's been a discussion recently about the term 'rotation' and whether it's appropriate to describe healer's DPS gameplay. As far as I can see, the playerbase has accepted the term 'rotation' to mean 'the gameplay loop the job participates in, in order to deal damage'. If you zoom out far enough, this applies to healers too. SCH's 'rotation' currently, for example, is Broil x 11, Biolysis, Broil x 11, Biolysis, Broil x 11, Biolysis, Broil x 11, Biolysis. And that is a 2minute 'loop', which we 'rotate' through. Other jobs have more... varied, buttons to press within their 2min loop, but in the end, every job has one, even the healers. Even on a proc-based job like BRD, we refer to its gameplay loop as a 'rotation'.

I wouldn't ask the question of 'should healers have a rotation', because they do, even if that rotation was only made of one button (eg they remove our one DOT too). Rather, the question I'd ask is 'why do healers feel like the term 'rotation' does not apply'? And the answer to that, I think, is simply that there's not enough pieces to put together to create something we'd consider a 'rotation'.

As I mentioned in the OP, I would like to see the healing paradigm addressed. But I am all too aware that trying to use only changes to 'how we heal' (be that amount of HP, frequency of damage, etc) for a solution to the problem will not work. It needs to be a combination of the two halves of our kit, addressing both the damage side AND the healing side. And that's why I think the best way to start tackling this is to make adjustments to the damage side first. By adjusting the damage kits first, it is a much smaller job, with a much more 'instantly obvious' effect to the playerbase at large (that is, new actions/VFX/systems etc), and would serve to show, with tangible evidence, that 'hey we're working on adjustments', rather than a hazy 'please wait patiently' Lodestone post. It also means that for those who do not like the current healer gameplay, and wish to see adjustments, they might feel they can 'return to the role' sooner.