Healer dps is unfairly boring

[SamRF]

It's unfair in my opinion to people who main healers, how they have to go through solo content. What if they simplified the healing and made their dps a little more fun and engaging so they won't get bored out of their mind when going through solo content and will perhaps also have a much better time in instances since there you also dps more than heal and amount of dps healers put out is of pretty significant importance in high end content. My 2 cents, what do you think?

[DJMau]

So you want healers to have to worry about a DPS rotation on top of being responsible for keeping the party alive? Making one of the most stressful roles in a party into one of the most complex to play at a baseline level would not be a good idea design wise.

[WaxSw]

So you want healers to have to worry about a DPS rotation on top of being responsible for keeping the party alive? Making one of the most stressful roles in a party into one of the most complex to play at a baseline level would not be a good idea design wise.

YES, right now with scripted damage and how OP the heals are keeping the party alive is not even remotely hard, the only difficult part would be trying to optimize the hardest content and the mechanics of the fight and that can be solved with practice, as they are now healers are a job that gets more and more flat and boring the better you are at it with large amounts of downtime and little to do in them and a more complex dps rotation (or just something that makes the job being something different from 2-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1) would solve that

[Corbeau]

So you want healers to have to worry about a DPS rotation on top of being responsible for keeping the party alive?

Yes.

Making one of the most stressful roles in a party into one of the most complex to play at a baseline level would not be a good idea design wise.

lmao

[Risvertasashi]

So you want healers to have to worry about a DPS rotation on top of being responsible for keeping the party alive? Making one of the most stressful roles in a party into one of the most complex to play at a baseline level would not be a good idea design wise.

In all seriousness: I wouldn't mind a flat increase in healer DPS, across the board.

Some solo instances are tediously slow - it's pretty clear the devs tuned the mobs' TTK around red jobs' output level. Which makes it boring not just because of the single filler nuke - I'd agree that I don't want a more complex rotation to manage on top of savage healing, etc - but because it takes sooo long for some stuff to die.

[SamRF]

So you want healers to have to worry about a DPS rotation on top of being responsible for keeping the party alive? Making one of the most stressful roles in a party into one of the most complex to play at a baseline level would not be a good idea design wise.

This could be partly compensated by simplifying the healing (e.g. removing some support/healing abilities or merging them) so you might get a balanced level of complexity by taking some from the healing and adding it to dps. It also wouldn't be such disaster (except for high end instances perhaps) if you wouldn't be able to dps well as a healer in training, and keeping the party alive would actually be made easier since healing would be more simplified. It doesn't have to be a complex dps rotation, it could be something very simple, but it should at least be worthy of being called a dps rotation in my opinion instead of just spamming 1 ability and occasionally adding a debuff DoT. This could also potentially open the door to introducing more healer jobs since it's much easier to play around with dps variables than finding unique ways to heal while keeping things balanced.

[Risvertasashi]

This could be partly compensated by simplifying the healing (e.g. removing some support/healing abilities or merging them) so you might get a balanced level of complexity by taking some from the healing and adding it to dps.

Oh gods please no. Healing is bad enough as it is, we don't need to start gutting the kit.

[althenawhm]

Oh gods please no. Healing is bad enough as it is, we don't need to start gutting the kit.

Healing kit is going to get hit next expansion anyway, since there are not enough DPS skills to cull for the new skills.

[Saefinn]

Oh gods please no. Healing is bad enough as it is, we don't need to start gutting the kit.

Whilst in my set up, I have plenty of extra space for DPS skills I expect they'll only allow a certain number of skills before considering it "button bloat", so I expect they'll remove healing spells to accommodate DPS skills they're going to have to remove some healing spells, which arguably are underutilised anyway. My preference would be to not get rid of them of course, because as I say, I've got room in my set up. But if Blue Mage taught me anything less is more. My healing experience was improved by having less bloat. Sadly 95% of the game's content doesn't utilise your kit.

I don't find healing stressful in this game. It's engaging, and I enjoy it. And as I have said previously, all the other healers in my FC and linkshells are also happy with the current iterations. I have 4 DPS buttons on SCH and 4 on WHM and that's plenty thanks. If I wanted to focus on a more complex DPS rotation, I'd play a DPS.

This is the counter argument I keep hearing, "if I wanted to focus on a more complex DPS rotation, I'd play a DPS". The problem with this is that the changes haven't made me lose that green DPS focus, it's just made it boring as heck. These changes would have been fine if they adjusted the game's design to reduce that downtime and utilise more of our healing toolkit for more variety instead of periods of time where in effect it feels like you're spamming 1 button. However, by design they've made green DPS a focus in this game, which is appropriate, given it's not uncommon in Final Fantasy design for your healer job/character to contribute to damage when they're not healing and if anything separates it from something like WoW. So if we have the DPS focus, it's not unreasonable to want that part to feel more engaging than it currently does, especially when they used to have a good balance where it didn't feel boring.

That said, I don't mind if they replaced the DPS with something else, support, enfeebling, crowd control, the need to heal etc. What I don't want is this big chunk where it feels like I am doing nothing.

However, DPS is the simplest solution, because it respects how this game's encounters are designed, doesn't screw with current healing design and it's how the jobs /were/ designed before they were gutted and we did just fine back then.

I get that there are people who praise the current healer design. I feel like they should have put all that design philosophy into a new job. This is the advantage to having multiple jobs, you can accommodate different playstyles. This way they would have appealed to the people who want a simpler DPS rotation without negatively impacting those who were already satisfied with the level of complexity their respective healers had.

An evolution on HW's healers would be good (but not make SCH OP this time, maybe SB for AST? I don't have much pre-ShB experience of AST to make a call) and a 4th healer taking the ShB design philosophy for healers (perhaps an adaptation of ShB WHM because it is the best designed of the 3)

[Side-Eye]

This could be partly compensated by simplifying the healing (e.g. removing some support/healing abilities or merging them) so you might get a balanced level of complexity by taking some from the healing and adding it to dps. It also wouldn't be such disaster (except for high end instances perhaps) if you wouldn't be able to dps well as a healer in training, and keeping the party alive would actually be made easier since healing would be more simplified. It doesn't have to be a complex dps rotation, it could be something very simple, but it should at least be worthy of being called a dps rotation in my opinion instead of just spamming 1 ability and occasionally adding a debuff. This could also potentially open the door to introducing more healer jobs since it's much easier to play around with dps variables than finding unique ways to heal while keeping things balanced.

Frankly, "Cleric Stance" was one of the tools meant to supplement healers' DPS when the need for healing wasn't great.

Squeenix screwed this and several other pooches when they decided to homogenize healers and remove utility. AST just felt it the most, since their card system had been an integral part of their utility. Oh well. Wait another year and a half for 6.0 ... and have fun playing tank and dps jobs.