Give Healers a simple DPS kit

[ForsakenRoe]

Maybe you should focus on actually finishing MSQ and doing some content.

I've done DT content, including Week 1 Savage clears, and agree with their desire for Healers to be more than 'spam Glare/Broil for 30s while waiting for the next damage to occur' in all levels of content.

Or is my opinion also invalid because I didn't do FRU?

So you want something special that the game doesnt even provide to other jobs?

What do you want?

You know how WHM currently is, Glare as filler, Dia as a 30s DOT? How about:

Glare: Filler spell, 350p
Dia: 250p on cast, 12s DOT of 70p, total of 530p
Banish: New button, instantcast GCD. Starts as Water from the level 15 Job quest, upgrades whenever Stone does. Always 40p stronger than Stone/Glare (at max level, 390p). Has a 15s CD (like how Macrocosmos has a 180s CD but is a GCD)

Tune the potencies as required, of course. Ignoring Dia and just using another Glare in its place would be less punishing with this, than it would in the current game. Ignoring Banish and just using another Glare in its place, would cost an average of 6.6p per GCD. At the same time, you could choose to delay Banish on purpose, to use it for a movement-heavy point in the fight to fill what would normally be an 'empty GCD' (because you're moving and cannot cast Glare) with Banish, turning a 0p GCD into a 390p one, instantly turning the insignificant damage loss into a cool optimization and damage gain. Also, spamming Dia as your 'movement option' would be far less punishing to your damage output compared to current WHM

Just those two changes alone (shorter Dia with rescaled potency, addition of Banish), takes Glare from being about 66% of our 2min loop, to more like 40%. Dia and Banish being instantcasts, would mean WHM would have around 60% of its DPS rotation with full mobility, which would also help casual players maintain high damage even during intense movement mechanics. If I got just those changes for WHM compared to DT, I'd be happy with that. Instead, what I'm apparently going to be getting, is no Banish, and a duration of 0 seconds for Dia because it's being removed


edit

Also as I mentioned, and I'll elaborate a bit more, there was a niche side of SCH back then, from my understanding, where you could really push your mana to its limits to squeeze out more damage on SCH, but I don't really want other people trying to do that on SCH when im in PF. We already have issues with healers greeding in PF without all of that.

The 'niche side' was that Miasma 2 was pretty MP-intensive, and while a DPS loss compared to a Broil, could be used to open up a double-weave space, or for movement (whereas Broil didn't allow for even a single-weave, due to the 2.5s cast time). The difference in damage between the two, could be made up for via Energy Drain, with the total exceeding the Broil it was replacing. So, a well-practiced SCH could get a DPS gain out of Miasma 2, provided that A: they were able to be in Melee distance to hit the enemy with it, B: didn't need to use Miasma 2 again within 12s (as that was the DOT's duration), C: had an Aetherflow stack to spend on Energy Drain, D: didn't need that stack for anything else like a Soil or Indom, and E: had the MP economy to spend on a Miasma 2, in the knowledge that their expenditure in the now, wouldn't be an issue later in the fight. The sheer amount of conditions that had to be 'correct' to make use of such an optimiztion meant it never needed to be used by the vast majority of players, but this game has something of an issue with players thinking that an optimization tech is 'mandatory you MUST do it or you're bad'

Alternatively, you might be thinking of HW SMN, where Dreadwyrm Trance reduced the MP cost of Ruin 3 massively, but you could elect to use Ruin 3 outside of DWT for more damage (compared to using Ruin 1 while waitign for DWT to come back up), at the cost of absolutely obliterating your MP economy (like, 'out of MP in under 30s' kind of speed)

[Carighan]

Glare: Filler spell, 350p
Dia: 250p on cast, 12s DOT of 70p, total of 530p
Banish: New button, instantcast GCD. Starts as Water from the level 15 Job quest, upgrades whenever Stone does. Always 40p stronger than Stone/Glare (at max level, 390p). Has a 15s CD (like how Macrocosmos has a 180s CD but is a GCD)

Oh so it's just "every 12s press Dia, every 15s press Banish, press Glare otherwise"? Many gameplay. So skill. Much rotation. Wow.

I'm sorry, but if that is your solution, then just having Glare is genuinely superior: It is exactly as braindead, yet it takes up only 1 hotbar slot instead of 3.

I am always flabbergasted when people who seem to only play FFXIV consider these "same braindead rotation but spread over more buttons" somehow involved / skillful / interesting / whatever. To me that is even more boring because either way I want my brain to be shut off as I got nothing to do mentally but your solution forces me to keep enough of it on to go through the rote (we know instant casts aren't pooled like that, ask anybody waiting for a Summoner isntant rezz that they spent on 0.5s faster cast while standing still for one skill!) rotation with no skill expression or intervention from my side.

If you want a simple DPS toolkit, just add some randomization instead. Why are FFXIV players so allergic to the one thing that trivially makes the utterly static rotation of the equally-boring-to-play DPS setups here more interesting, yet nobody ever seems to get the crucial difference here vs any other MMORPG that has successfully solved this problem?

Sorry, rant over. Sigh. :< Apologies. This annoys me madly every time.

[ty_taurus]

Joke's on you. I personally love RNG mechanics in my RPGs, so all you're doing is threatening me with a good time. That said, the idea that anything with structure is virtually the same as just spamming Glare is mind boggling to me. That's like saying playing Requiem for a Dream on electric guitar is essentially just the same as strumming the same chord over and over endlessly.

Your job's rotation is your instrument, and the optimal rotation is your sheet music. Which of these songs seems more fun to play for a pianist?

Option A:
Bb A D D G F-F-.Bb
D# D .A .Bb .A - D
Bb A D D G F F-.Bb
D# D .A .Bb .A-D

Option B:
E E E E E
E E E E E
E E E E E
E E E E E

Naturally, a healer's offensive music needs to be easy to jump in and out of to adapt to the state of the battle because correcting other players' mistakes is a part of healer gameplay (even is savage rarely makes it an option) but Option B is not music, it's noise. We don't want noise. We want music.

[Carighan]

That said, the idea that anything with structure is virtually the same as just spamming Glare is mind boggling to me. That's like saying playing Requiem for a Dream on electric guitar is essentially just the same as strumming the same chord over and over endlessly.

Your example is a good way of expressing why static rotation type class design can work. Because at some point of complexity, the static rotation takes up all brainspace.

But for that to happen, it has to be complicated to know how to plan out the rotation in advance. It is static, but you can't just write it down for 10 minutes of fight as a long list, there's too many edge cases and external factors, basically.

One of those, as per your exaggeration, is just making it so complicated that it becomes really difficult to pull off even in a vacuum. To expand from your example, yes, people can play that. Could the same person do it while playing a round of Twister, only there's 4 boards in 4 different rooms and they have to run into a different every so often and each time they do first move their gear around? And only have 3 seconds for each time they need to move? Probably not, no. There might be a guitarist who can do that, but you'd reasonably assume that's not possible, right?
That's what a truly difficult static rotation would be like in the context of FFXIV's raid design: The game intentionally puts ~all difficulty into the fight. This is done for a variety of reasons, chief of which is - IMO - the sheer number of classes they need to support, and hence making the difficulty be fight-side not character-side ensures it only has to be balanced once, not 23 times.

Now, to get back to your example, the thing here is that what is happening with marginally-complex damage rotation vs simple damage rotation is not what you write, but:
* 1-2-3-4-5, then 1-2-6-7-5. Note the shared elements, and also how each of these sets of 5 is fully static.
* 5x1 then 5x2. Note the shared elements, and also how each of these sets of 5 is fully static.

Now importantly, the two are mentally exactly the same. The only difference is in rote finger movement, something that even after marginal amounts of time spent with a class is just muscle memory. Which is, in turn, the very reason Dragoon (as the example used here) is so insanely boring to play: Despite seemingly having so many abilities, your brain is Hard-Off mode while playing it. There is no difficulty. There is no engagement.

Now, is just pressing 1 5 times an then 2 5 times even easier? No. It's just as easy. And just as boring. Why is it then better? Because it uses less hotbar buttons, leading to easier use of controllers and ease of access (which is not the same as difficulty, unless you want to talk to your local council for accessibility laws in IT development). If nothing is lost, then there's no need to do it with 9 buttons if 2 suffice. And nothing is lost, because there is just nothing to lose in the first place.

In fact, go a step further: GW2 made the #1 skill fire automatically if you're not filling the time with intentional button presses. THAT is what current damage setups feel like to play. Like they ought to be the auto-cast skill in GW2.

We don't want noise. We want music.

And yet people on the forums keep asking for noise. Huh. "Just give me more buttons to push!". Noise.

(edit)
But the RNG-parts were mentioned for a reason: I love RNG in my MMORPGs, and in fact I feel that not embracing it directly (baked into skills) or at least indirectly (via fight randomization or quasi-randomization) naturally leads to inferior class designs.
Static Rotation type classes ought to be few and far between, usually at most 1 per role, to contrast with all the non-static ones. This won't always work out, but it ought to be the target goal.

What's really annoying for me is just how readily they could do this here. It starts with such simple things such as why the Freecure/Benefic procs from the lower ability instead of the nuke. It continues into why positionals aren't procs based off of preceeding skills making you spontaneously want to shuffle into a position instead of knowing beforehand. It then continues via why Viper isn't fully randomized left/right chains instead of the predictable ones despite how obviously the job was set up this way with its UI element. And then lands on things such as why all DoT durations and all CDs are reliable, with no autoprocs to mess with it (e.g. one tank has the shortest invuln CD by far but they also cannot press it ever, it's a passive that auto-triggers on hitting 0HP and then has a short cooldown).

Even WoW, has a lot of the last element to make specific states of resources+CDs at any specific moment in any specific fight quite unreliable moment-to-moment. They love their autoprocs, and for good reason. And they principally do fudged PPMs (another thing FFXIV could readily copy at 0 loss and All gain for gameplay depth, but utterly refuses to) as their type of randomness, not quasi-randomness-chaotic states of resources+CDs, which is more a thing of older games such as DAoC or EQ1.

For healers, I'd give all but one healer (to make them stand out) a randomized effect with two separate components on their simple damage kit. So for example on White Mage:

* Glare is an instant cast. 2.5s GCD. It has a PPM-chance (~3? Fudged, of course.) to trigger Focused Glare.
* Focused Glare is a 10s-ish lasting buff that is consumed when you press Glare, making you instead cast a 3.5s (yes!) hard cast that causes ~3x the normal Glare damage.
* You cannot access Glare while Focused Glare is up. Play with the hand the game deals you, not the ideal hand.
* On hitting with High Glare, a random 1-4 stacks of One With Nature is gained. Failure to use the buff or aborting the cast always gives 1 stack.
* One With Nature reduces all GCD times to 1.5s. It does not actually speed up casts!

So the skill component here comes from the unreliable and ever-changing cadence. Your GCD constantly shifts, as does your desire to stand still and be casting. It's also unreliable, and you cannot delay the need to resolve the problem in front of you, not really at least.

This is of course assuming I'd make White Mage have a randomization-component. I feel if anything I'd want White Mage to be the non-random healer, and in that case I'd give WHM uniquely a 3.0s or 3.5s base GCD, and all abilites (no oGCDs at all!) are 2.5s+ casts, many are actually 3.5s. To make up for the amount of casts that cannot be completed due to movement, the raw numbers would be quite high, and even more so: Every 0.5s not casting a spell gives as stacking buff that increases the raw potency fo the next nuke or heal and consumes the stacks, up to say, a limit of 6-10 stacks. Never so that intentionally not casting is better than doing it, but also not grossly worse.

Although like I said in another post, the truly biggest thing they could do is get away from oGCD as a concept, anyways. Eliminate the fixed GCD, instead cause a GCD equal the animation-lock of an ability to press, and that's it: Abilities just have their animation lock (and a castbar if warranted), done. That'd also truly throw open to the door to a massive amount of potentially random or randomized abilities.

[ty_taurus]

You know, I’m reminded of the conversations about Eukrasian Dyskrasia from the Dawntrail Media Tour where the DOT would stack with Eukrasian Dosis’, and a lot of people were excited about the addition because it meant another DPS option for Sage, and something that was reminiscent of Stormblood’s happy accident in Miasma II. But I was in disagreement because the duration of E. Dyskrasia was the same as E. Dosis, and thus it wouldn’t actually add to the cadence of Sage’s DPS because it would always line up with your other DOT.

Now, there was the other suggestion which was it being an alternative to Toxikon II which I wasn’t a fan of for other reasons, but the main point is that with the mentality of maintaining the DOT’s uptime, it would feel like noise, to me, rather than music. But that’s not what Roe’s suggestion would evoke. Because with a 12 second DOT and a 15 second cooldown, you have components to your music that are in flux. They’re not lining up the same way every time. It’s one of the qualities that actually does work for the DPS abilities we have now, actually. The main issue with the current system is that these breaks in tempo are so far apart that you inevitably get trapped in long droughts of one-note Glare spam, like the buildup to a beat drop that just won’t come.

So Roe’s suggestion does address this by keeping the tempo moving at a decent pace. Like my suggestion of just half the DOT duration and cooldown of Sage’s non-Dosis DPS actions, it works as the bare minimum. Could it be better? Absolutely, but it at least would offer a musicality that has rhythm and isn’t just the occasional riff on an otherwise monotonous single chord strumming.

[ForsakenRoe]

Oh so it's just "every 12s press Dia, every 15s press Banish, press Glare otherwise"? Many gameplay. So skill. Much rotation. Wow.

I'm sorry, but if that is your solution, then just having Glare is genuinely superior: It is exactly as braindead, yet it takes up only 1 hotbar slot instead of 3.

Do these two images really look as 'braindead' as each other to you?


You might consider such a rotation 'braindead', others might not. There is still nuance to it, even as 'braindead' as you claim it is. For example, being able to hold onto Banish for a GCD or two, to use it for a high-intensity movement section, means that the 'every 15s press Banish' is no longer 'every 15s' guaranteed. Additionally, without any exterior mechanics interrupting the player (ie you're fighting a training dummy), every 60s the two actions align with one another, asking to be used on the same GCD, and you would need to choose between them, which to use first. For the most part, it'd be Dia because it's more damage, but in a situation like an Ultimate where the boss jumps away to do a Trio quite often, or if it's the end of a fight, Dia might not have enough time to tick and do its full damage, and so the up-front damage of Banish might be the superior option for 'optimal damage'.

The suggestion also was stripped down to 'just the Damage rotation changes', so of course it may look a bit barren/uninteractive on its own. Because it's intended to tie into a whole other system which enables you to GCD Heal more frequently, while remaining damage-neutral. So how about I post the full version, with all the bells and whistles:

New 0-100 Gauge is added, called the 'Vigilance Gauge'. As you do your duty as one of Nature's Wardens (aka, when you cast spells that cost MP), you gain Vigilance.

Glare: Filler spell, 350p. Generates 1 point of 'Vigilance'
Dia: 250p on cast, 12s DOT of 70p, total of 530p. Generates 1 point of 'Vigilance' on cast, and 1 point each time it deals damage over time.
Banish: New button, instantcast GCD. Starts as Water from the level 15 Job quest, upgrades whenever Stone does. Always 40p stronger than Stone/Glare (at max level, 390p). Has a 15s CD. Grants 5 'Vigilance'

Holy generates 2 'Vigilance' per enemy hit.
Cure2 generates 5 'Vigilance' when cast.
Regen generates 4 'Vigilance' when cast, and 1 per tick, for a total of 10.
Medica 3 generates 3 'Vigilance' whenever a tick heals the WHM, for a total of 15.
Cure3 generates 20 'Vigilance'.

Blessing of the Elementals: AOE Heal, GCD, 750p. Costs 50 Vigilance (giving it a pseudo-CD of around 1min when fully DPS-focused, lower if using GCD healing).
Grants a Petal of Ireful Earth, Petal of Wrathful Winds, and Petal of Raging Rivers to the Job Gauge. You can hold up to two of each Petal.
(Learned from the level 50 Job quest instead of Benediction, which is moved to 'just reach level 50 and you get it')

Quake: 450p, 50% less to nearby targets. Glare becomes Quake when a Petal of Ireful Earth is present on the Job Gauge.
Tornado: 300p on cast, 12s DOT of 95p, total of 680p. 50% less to nearby targets (the DOT is also applied to nearby targets at 50% potency). Dia becomes Tornado when a Petal of Wrathful Winds is present on the Job Gauge.
Flood: 490p, 50% less to nearby targets. Banish becomes Flood when a Petal of Raging Rivers is present on the Job Gauge.

This idea was written during the leadup to Dawntrail, and so the original intention was that, a player who just wants to play WHM could use the healing action whenever they need to heal, and their damage is automatically refunded when they use the now-flashing buttons of Quake, Flood and Tornado. But for an optimization-minded player, they'd want to try and wrangle their Healing CD use, such that the last GCD they use before the 2min window is Blessing of the Elementals, so that their Burst window is Misery, Quake, Flood, Tornado and their three uses of Glare 4. Of course, that doesn't matter as much now that we won't be having 2min burst windows in Evercold. The casual player, more likely to make use of 'damage-loss GCD Healing' like Regen or Medica3, would see their Gauge generation speed massively increased, and so while it wouldn't give them 100% damage-neutrality, it'd help them retain more of their damage compared to the current Dawntrail design

Besides that, though, it'd also mean we'd go from one button in AOE situations (Holy spam) to as many as FIVE (Holy, BOTE, Quake, Flood, Tornado) should the player wish to make use of that many, and it'd allow WHM a way to apply their DOT in an AOE (which would then accelerate how fast the Gauge is generated, giving them even faster access to more Healing from using BOTE again). The player would also be able to 'prepare' Gauge at the end of a boss in a dungeon, and go into the next trash pull with a Misery, and two casts of each of Quake, Tornado and Flood. WHM (along with BLM) caused a Calamity, and players would get to see how first-hand, as they tear dungeon trash mobs apart with elemental devastation

But of course, Banish does damage and Glare does damage, so we might as well just have Glare. Wish we could say the same about having Healing actions. Medica heals in an AOE, Rapture heals in an AOE but is instantcast, yet we have both in Evercold. Why do we need both, when thus far (and there's no reason to believe this will have changed) they have the same potency? Same with Cure and Solace, just remove Solace and Rapture entirely, and then we don't need Plenary as a button! At least with Banish/Glare above, they have different potencies, different cooldowns, different Gauge generation rates.


You suggest randomization instead, to make the rotation more interesting. There are a statistically significant portion of players who despise randomness in their Healer gameplay, so much so that SE removed the randomness from AST's cards (despite it being based on Tarot, where 'randomness' is the point of the activity). What would the 'random proc' even do for us, 'your Glare has a X% chance to make Holy 3x stronger for its next cast', which translates to 'press Holy if it starts flashing'? And that gameplay, of 'press flashing button', with no other interplay in the kit than 'it deals damage', is somehow less 'braindead' a gameplay loop?

[Wildheaven182]

The fanboys really desperately want to kill their game so hard, it's difficult to stop them from advocating for the natural selection removal of ffxiv from the mmo market. But we try to subsidize these people as best we can at our own expense.

Theyre not against healers having more interesting gameplay, their identity is linked to the game in such an intense way that any constructive criticism of it translates to a personal attack on them that poses an existential threat.

They defend the status quo not because of its own merit, but because they are actually defending their own identity. They are defending their parasocial relationship with the devs. They are defending their childhood memories and nostalgia of playing FF games. They are defending the thousand dollars theyve spent on sub time and expacs and emotes. They are signaling that they are a member of the tribe of squex fans.
They are not opposing the arguments being made.

They will feign any true argument only to abide by these principles, but intentionally misunderstand and miscontrue the message being communicated in order to do so.

Tldr: Healers are fine because I love ffxiv.

[RaionKansen]

Do these two images really look as 'braindead' as each other to you?

Absolutely. Its why just slapping on more GCDs/oGCDs doesn't solve anything. People would pog out for a couple weeks and then ultimately end up saying that basically nothing has changed.

That's also why people keep asking for filler rotation to just be on 1 button.

[RaionKansen]

The fanboys really desperately want to kill their game so hard, it's difficult to stop them from advocating for the natural selection removal of ffxiv from the mmo market. But we try to subsidize these people as best we can at our own expense.

Theyre not against healers having more interesting gameplay, their identity is linked to the game in such an intense way that any constructive criticism of it translates to a personal attack on them that poses an existential threat.

They defend the status quo not because of its own merit, but because they are actually defending their own identity. They are defending their parasocial relationship with the devs. They are defending their childhood memories and nostalgia of playing FF games. They are defending the thousand dollars theyve spent on sub time and expacs and emotes. They are signaling that they are a member of the tribe of squex fans.
They are not opposing the arguments being made.

They will feign any true argument only to abide by these principles, but intentionally misunderstand and miscontrue the message being communicated in order to do so.

Tldr: Healers are fine because I love ffxiv.

I'm not sure who this comment is directed towards, but personally I'm very critical of CS3. I think there's been a lot that they've dropped the ball on the last few years and I haven't hesitated to be vocal about it. So much so that I was banned from the largest discord and the main subreddit in years past. Just because someone disagrees with you doesn't mean they're defending the company. It might just mean that your take is bad or you're just ignorant/naive about something.

[Carighan]

Absolutely. Its why just slapping on more GCDs/oGCDs doesn't solve anything. People would pog out for a couple weeks and then ultimately end up saying that basically nothing has changed.

That's also why people keep asking for filler rotation to just be on 1 button.

That's not something I'd agree on because what ForsakenRoe posted is not a melee-style filler rotation. Yes, there's no reason that the entire 10-button (is it 10?) Dragoon fillter-chain isn't on a single button or at most two (to allow mis-cycling it for manual-reset purposes). Because it has a fixed order it executes in. You cannot deviate from it without also automatically being a failure state.

What ForsakenRoe posted isn't that. It's not a fixed-sequence, or rather well, it is, but it's quite a complex and long-looping fixed sequence so it's easier to write as a priority-list, and the moment that feels naturaly, you know it should no longer be one button really.

Rather, the issue I have with it - and why I said they're equally boring - is that it uses 3 buttons to achieve... nothing extra. It doesn't need 3 buttons to do what it wants. The ideas of having a short DoT you need to constantly refresh and a 4-times-a-minute instant cast or so are interesting, but not if they need +200% hotbar buttons for so little extra depth provided. A version I would say is quite fine (assuming that SQEX still hard-blocks all RNG-based class design and hence what I wrote above about semi-randomized DoT duration and semi-randomized or proc-based instant casts is a hard no-go) would be to automatically turn the button into the DoT after ~4 glares, and while you're moving, it automatically turns into Banish (assuming DoT has a cast bar which seems logical given the setup) but that effect has a 15s CD if Banish is used. Yes, it's marginally less depth than what ForsakenRoe posted but it sacrifices quite little depth, at 1/3rd of the button space needed.

That was my point. Not that it's a static filler rotation. Filler rotations absolutely ought to be 1-buttoned, but that's a different category.