If healers had a 3 Button GCD Combo like Tanks?

[Shikiseki]

Instead of wasting 3 slots on a simple 1-2-3 step combo, make it a little more creative:

WHM: Uses a Wind/Water/Earth gcd to charge up gauges that will turn the elemental button into a Movement/Regen/Shield buff respectively after 3 gcds. That means you have about 6 gcds worth to decide when to use the charged up buffs.

SCH: Uses "scan" on a short timer that buffs either its light or dark aspected gcd chain attacks. If you finish the 3-step one button combo, you get an extra aetherflow and can rescan to repeat.

AST: Honestly, the best would be the return of the Spread/Shuffle/Royal Road system but with 2 decks: one for damage and one utility focused. That will keep the job busy enough to just have the 1.5s malefic be the filler as it was supposed to be.

SGE: This one doesn't need more buttons imo but you can spice up it's "rotation" with a lil dancer-style memory minigame: each kardia heal will light up a noulith on your job gauge that represents one of your 4 damage buttons (Dosis, Phlegma, Toxikon, Dyskrasia) in a random order. Once you've healed 4 times with kardia, the buttons will change and light up in order they have appeared and the Psyche button will turn into the finisher. This will reward players that know their hotbars well to quickly press the right noulith button in the correct order

Minimal effort for a little more engagement than 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-2-1....

[Ramiee]

What is the problem with overheal, exactly? If you're not losing damage from healing more than you need to, what does it matter if you heal something that they could have survived without?

Depends on how the game is designed but in most MMOs it's bad because it's:
1. A waste of resources
2. A loss of damage

There are some classes and jobs in MMOs where this isn't that much of a problem, Sage for example you don't worry about overhealing with Kardia. It's just kinda an issue on WHM because of the use of GCD which throughout all of FF14s history has been prioritised for damage for healers.

"After using resources, you get access to a nuke" is a fun design and a lot of why lilies are good is that you've got a ton of flexibility on when you use them and when you use your spender.

It is fun but comes with the problem of people wasting heals on it for damage gain. It's why having an rng component on blood lily makes it work, you aren't guaranteed a damage gain from wasting lily heals so you won't waste them. It's not like how shield swipe on paladin worked where it was a damage gain to have a chance of procing it so standing in AoEs was worth it for personal damage. I think WHM is well designed in this aspect.

I think Scholar in particular would need a rework in order to change more actions to charges, but I also think Fey Blessing, Fey Union, Dissipation, and Protraction are not well designed. Dissipation is at least strong, unlike the other three, but it's a far worse offender on "all actions become DPS actions if they are capable of being used for DPS" than using the design philosophy of lilies more broadly and on more healers.

I disagree with Dissipation, it's well designed and has a purpose in the kit even though I personally don't like it, the turning it into DPS for ED is really annoying optimisation thing but I do agree that it is heavily encouraged especially in the opening. Protraction is up for debate but fey blessing and union are bad.
I don't think all healers need lily's like damage refund system, it works well on WHM because WHM identity is around pure healing completely. SCH having damage tied to its pet or it's dot back work better imo.
But yeah 1-2-3 don't really work on healers because they're casters.

[Derio]

They are casters. So just like tanks have minimized versions of melee dps. Healers should have minimized versions of caster dps. Each healer should have their own unique dps rotation that have heals built in the dps rotation.

But that wont happen. JP philosophy is if you want to have more dps buttons just play a dps, which is not the same for other MMOs that have healers.

[Carighan]

which is not the same for other MMOs that have healers.

Nevermind that in other MMORPGs, the group actually takes damage, so not only do you have more damage buttons, you don't remotely need them as much as the lion share of your time, you are busy healing.

On a healer!

Imagine that!

[wildvenonat]

It is fun but comes with the problem of people wasting heals on it for damage gain. It's why having an rng component on blood lily makes it work, you aren't guaranteed a damage gain from wasting lily heals so you won't waste them. It's not like how shield swipe on paladin worked where it was a damage gain to have a chance of procing it so standing in AoEs was worth it for personal damage. I think WHM is well designed in this aspect.

People do waste lily heals, though? If you're in an alliance raid, and you go a while without anything interesting happening, it's completely reasonable to burn a lily for no reason just to have Misery up for the next buff window.

WHM is mostly well designed at high levels in general. It is also the one class that has a gcd refund setup, but what I want for a more complicated dps setup isn't all refunds. What I want is reliable incentives to be using most of the healer kit, even if you're in content that has been massively power crept. It's not inherently bad for Void Ark as an example to have a lot of sleepy moments where you just exist.

Imagine, if you will, that spending an Aetherflow on a healing action ensured your next Biolysis would have double potency. This on its own would change the damage calculation of sch so that you _want_ to use an effective Aetherflow heal or mitigation, while leaving Energy Drain as a way to dump Aetherflow to avoid overcapping.

Or if breaking a Divine Benison then gives a doubled Dia.

I don't know sage or ast's kits well enough to have a good idea on what healing tools with charges would be fun to tie in to damage output, but what I think would be enjoyable is that if you are regularly rewarded for using most of your hotbar efficiently, even in casual content. Most of the healer players angry about the lack of damage rotation and the simplicity of healing don't do high end regardless.

I do not want more healing tools put in the category of "it's a dps gain to use this on cooldown". I think those are not very exciting, on the whole. "This is used on cooldown" doesn't involve that much more thought than "I lost multiple uses of this skill because there was honestly no point to doing it". There will always be a bunch of head empty roulette content. I would rather have the healing and damage parts of the kits more integrated so that I'm not spending eons with a full Fey Union gauge because it's not worth the effort to burn it.

IMO most healers want something to problem solve more than they want to press buttons that aren't your two primary attacks more often. Incentives to use your resources and not overcap them, while giving you flexibility in when you actually spend them, seem a pretty obvious direction to go in that's a lot more interesting than a 1 2 3 combo.

[Erit]

doesn't that sound a bit like old Cleric Stance?

It took you barely three lines to explain why this was unlikely to ever happen. Cleric Stance was put to the sword, for good or ill, and thus anything resembling it in terms of impact on gameplay will meet an identical fate, for good or ill.

[Ramiee]

snip.

I think the lily system is fine as is, I don't think the whole idea of all whm heals contributing to a damage building system is good either. Like a lot of people say having cures chance proc sacred sight would be good but I don't know about that.
All healers can have their own DPS systems that can or can not include 1-2-3.

I think a 1-2 on sage could work for the idea of a damage healer and I think old dot scholar and eye for an eye selene worked well enough. Integrated healing and damage has its pros and caviates but I think it should exist as an option on the game, even though I prefer a separate healing and damage system there's 4 jobs in the game 1 or 2 of them can have integrated, you know if CBU3 still cared about appeasing more than 1 type of player per role.

[Silver-Strider]

I think the lily system is fine as is, I don't think the whole idea of all whm heals contributing to a damage building system is good either.

I think it depends on how it's handled. If, for example, they returned Fluid Aura as an oGCD that procs off of using Cure 2 that just matched the potency of Stone/Glare, it would work fine since you wouldn't really be gaining any damage in that case at all.