Why don't we have more DPS abilities ?

[Naychan]

Hello guys.

As a WHM player, I'm wondering why most of our DPS comes from spells ?

I means, if ~40% of our DPS came from spells and ~60% from short CD abilities (4 or 5 sec cooldown), we would prioritize healing spells over healing abilities when healing are required.

That way, it would be the occasion to bring back earth/wind/water to WHM while keeping light spells we have now. And we would have a more complex DPS rotation.

According to SE they want everybody to play healers & they don't want to pressure people into DPSing because they choose a healer, therefor they should only heal. From what I have read from many players is that they don't want to dps they just want to heal. The players that don't heal, don't want healers to dps because they might miss a heal. So thank the lazy butt player base who moaned and whined about having to dps and saying that healers were to hard to play. But on the bright side you can do most casual content w/o heals, just bring a WAR and dps to get though it much quicker. Dont forget to bring a rezzer.

I am not a raider, my friends are not raiders. I used to main scholar but normally I'm on summoner and we do rouletts w/o any healers. Even with a wipe its still faster then bringing a healer. So thanks SE way to make part of that trinity useless for most content. But hey at least they are respecting our time & encourage us to play other games.

[Raikai]

Told on another thread, but relates to this one.

I wish healer design was more similar to how Blue Mage healers function. Of course, BLU healing is kinda barebones, but the principle is there: They heal with Global Cooldowns, and damage comes mostly from an array of OGCDs and filler spells when healing is not needed. Everything costing MP.

Imagining the main healing jobs following those guidelines:
- Spammable damage GCD
- Spammable cheap, but weaker, healing actions
- Cooldown-based efficient healing actions
- Damage based oGCDs
- A couple of healing 'emergency' oGCDs

We could even think how MP could matter again for healers, if everything had a MP cost, and MP replenishment was a mechanic to deal with something more interesting than Lucid Dreaming. DPS actions, for example.

[orestaklos]

I sometimes watch my partner playing Healer on WoW and tbh it is much more thrilling healing the party. It comes down to that players are getting random attacks from adds and bosses, not only the tank takes the damage. Plus the adds and bosses hit much more than ffxiv. Also Mana managment makes the healer consider which prio on healing to hold.

[Carighan]

I sometimes watch my partner playing Healer on WoW and tbh it is much more thrilling healing the party. It comes down to that players are getting random attacks from adds and bosses, not only the tank takes the damage. Plus the adds and bosses hit much more than ffxiv. Also Mana managment makes the healer consider which prio on healing to hold.

That's really the biggest thing, the random unpredictable damage spikes/output.

FFXIV could patch over its current issues, by making most~all bosses do any or all or a combination of:

1. Fire random shots into the raid every autoattack, hitting 1-2 people for 25%-40% of their health.
2. 360° cleave on autoattacks, hitting all melee characters.
3. Shoot random lines or circle AoEs, hitting everyone for 10%-20% of their health.
4. Crit on their autoattacks or "pierce", ignoring damage reductions for one autoattack.

All of these would most importantly making healing unpredictable. Meaning the usual "Use one of these oGCDs after every major mech" no longer works, damage is not even, it needs per-case handling. It also happens constantly, - hopefully - running our CD-based oGCDs out and then we have to heal with GCDs.

[Shurrikhan]

That's really the biggest thing, the random unpredictable damage spikes/output.

FFXIV could patch over its current issues, by making most~all bosses do any or all or a combination of:

1. Fire random shots into the raid every autoattack, hitting 1-2 people for 25%-40% of their health.
2. 360° cleave on autoattacks, hitting all melee characters.
3. Shoot random lines or circle AoEs, hitting everyone for 10%-20% of their health.
4. Crit on their autoattacks or "pierce", ignoring damage reductions for one autoattack.

All of these would most importantly making healing unpredictable. Meaning the usual "Use one of these oGCDs after every major mech" no longer works, damage is not even, it needs per-case handling. It also happens constantly, - hopefully - running our CD-based oGCDs out and then we have to heal with GCDs.

#1 sounds awkward as heck, so I'd only ever want to see it on fitting bosses (i.e., used sparingly). #2 would just mean that you shouldn't bring (any more than a single) melee to the fight, so iit should only come with commensurate risk added for ranged as well to balance it out. #3 is fine but only if staggered from less random nukes. #4's crit is fine, but removing tank agency by having it ignore tanks' primary role-specific skill-expressor is not.

All this being said, all it takes to deplete oGCDs is to increase relative healing requirements, not necessarily to randomize damage. The (somewhat-)unique affordance of randomization is to oblige healers to leave oGCDs on reserve for emergent high intensities (especially if not forcibly spaced away from the already scheduled damage intake).

[Grimforth]

I'm speaking from a DPS standpoint, but one thing that I've seen in a lot of dungeons is healers healing a lot more than DPSing. And I've also seen tanks take a ton of damage even through mitigation on large pulls with good gear.

I think the devs want healers to heal more than dps. So I think they buffed trash damage.

[Carighan]

We could even think how MP could matter again for healers, if everything had a MP cost, and MP replenishment was a mechanic to deal with something more interesting than Lucid Dreaming. DPS actions, for example.

I'd maybe invert that, even. With how everything in FFXIV including tanks and healers is always first and foremost DPS, maybe tie the damage output of healers to healing?

That is, our efficient healers regenerate mana instead of costing it. And just casting our DPS endlessly + using our healing oGCDs would run us out of mana, thus we want to cover some healing by the efficient heals that in turn give mana back to continue casting damage abilities. I'm onboard with making oGCDs cost mana though, and that's an "in general" thing, tbh.

[Shurrikhan]

MP is ultimately just a shared cooldown system.

Consider for instance if we had no spammable heals, just the CDs. Tuned accordingly (and likely with a much smaller range between max and min ilvl for the comment) every heal would matter such that you have to be careful and deliberate with your resources. Now, consider if we had no healing CDs, only MP costs across or otherwise spammable heals, and were tuned accordingly. Again, we'd have to be deliberate with our AoEs and Cure IIs.

It's less an issue by which GCD heals should give mana and oGCDs should spend it as simply that there isn't enough damage to go around for both, let alone for the capped-per-minute-healing of oGCDs to be leveraged uniquely for burst rather than general healing. Giving an MP cost to oGCDs commensurate to their burst would go some way to making some loss of offensive uptime unavoidable and therefore allowing individual attacks to be tuned higher, but the biggest problem is ultimately just that there isn't enough damage to interact with our spammable heals that often, simply because doing so sacrifices damage unnecessarily, even if we removed all MP costs.

[PyurBlue]

I'd maybe invert that, even. With how everything in FFXIV including tanks and healers is always first and foremost DPS, maybe tie the damage output of healers to healing?

That is, our efficient healers regenerate mana instead of costing it. And just casting our DPS endlessly + using our healing oGCDs would run us out of mana, thus we want to cover some healing by the efficient heals that in turn give mana back to continue casting damage abilities. I'm onboard with making oGCDs cost mana though, and that's an "in general" thing, tbh.

This is sort of like SGE then? You recover MP with your healing actions. This system has never felt good to me and you can end up in the situation where you're low on MP because there is nothing to heal and you have to use your heals not for healing, but just to gain MP. It also feels like the game is trying to hard to hold your hand too "You're a healer, so make sure you press those heal buttons". In my mind the motivation to heal should be that healing is needed, and that's it.

On the topic of MP I've been taking SCH into roulettes recently and I've found the level 50 AoW situation to be sort of interesting. AoW does the same damage as Ruin at 50 and is instant cast, its only short comings being range and MP cost. It ends up creating a MP tradeoff, at least on paper - the difference isn't that big and it's ARR content, where you can use an instant cast high MP damage or slower casting ranged low MP damage. Expanding that idea into a real mechanic instead of an accidental oversight could lead to a system with fun MP management.

[Supersnow845]

This is sort of like SGE then? You recover MP with your healing actions. This system has never felt good to me and you can end up in the situation where you're low on MP because there is nothing to heal and you have to use your heals not for healing, but just to gain MP. It also feels like the game is trying to hard to hold your hand too "You're a healer, so make sure you press those heal buttons". In my mind the motivation to heal should be that healing is needed, and that's it.

On the topic of MP I've been taking SCH into roulettes recently and I've found the level 50 AoW situation to be sort of interesting. AoW does the same damage as Ruin at 50 and is instant cast, its only short comings being range and MP cost. It ends up creating a MP tradeoff, at least on paper - the difference isn't that big and it's ARR content, where you can use an instant cast high MP damage or slower casting ranged low MP damage. Expanding that idea into a real mechanic instead of an accidental oversight could lead to a system with fun MP management.

The children yearn for miasma 2