A summary of healer issues

[Renathras]

preference thing. if i have 3 cooldowns that line up perfectly, i might as well have 1 cooldown that you press 3 times in a row à la continuation. its why i dont like ninja too much; everything goes into trick attack, therefore assassinate etc just feel like hotbar bloat to me. instead when things Dont line up, i actually have to look at the cooldown timers. if you want them to line up every 2 minutes, you only gotta make sure its LCM is 120. but i digress.

Maybe. But the solution there is to have shorter CDs that are used more frequently (give the player more to do in the downtime/maintenance phase anyway) that also line up with the bigger CDs.

For example, take any 30 sec CDs. On GNB, Gnashing Fang and Blasting Zone. They each have a 30 sec CD, so you can use them outside of your burst, justifying having a separate button. They can also, in theory, be held if there's some reason to do so (though there generally isn't outside of untargetable phases). But because thhe CD is 30 seconds, shorter than their 1 min burst, it means that not only do they get to use these fun abilities more often (to break up the monotony of the Job's "downtime" flow), but they also line up (unless you drift them) with your burst phase, allowing you to roll through them there as well to make your burst extra busy - which is a draw of the Job. Imagine if Gnasing Fang had a 90 second CD. That would just be...awkward.

Contrast with Bloodfest, which has a 90 second CD, which makes it clunky and janky. It lines up with every THIRD 1 min burst phase, and every 3rd (6 minute) 2 minute raid burst phase. It doesn't line up with Double Down. It BARELY lines up with Gnashing Fang (and this is more due to Gnashing Fang lining up with it as per the above paragraph, just every 3rd time instead of every other time), and it just often feels like a weird button to disrupt the flow of your rotation for no real enjoyment gain - burning some Burst Strikes to use BF without capping either cartridges or the BF CD is just clunky and not enjoyable. Something that WOULD make it fun to me is if it let you cast a Double Down every time you used it without triggering DD's cooldown. That would allow you to get DD use more often (which...I don't know why, I just love that ability - it's Fell Cleave for GNBs) while not pushing IT off of the 1 min cycle would probably be nicer, and it would give you some interesting options during the burst phases since you could potentially get a second Double Down in, which would just be wildly fun to me.

But as I said in that thread on the Damage Dealer forum in reply to that YouTube video: It's fine that some Jobs aren't for everyone. I'm kind of transitioning to WAR as my tank anyway. I like GNB, but I think WAR is more my speed if not my style...though Fell Cleave spam and Raw Intuition is also silly stupid fun. \

EDIT:

i know people will always have something to complain, but that shouldn't mean one ought to ignore every complaint. nothing will ever be perfect, and even if its perfect for one person, it wont be for someone else, but that doesnt mean you shouldn't at least try imo.
i do think the lessons of history could be good enough a deterrent though

I guess my issue is that if we go "these people are going to complain anyway", why make these sweeping changes for them in the first place? And if we DID give them EVERYthing they want, then you'd have EVERYONE ELSE (like me) complaining. So how is that an improvement?

No, I'd say leave WHM for us smooth brains and if the pro-complex complainers get complain-y, just remind them of ShB/EW and ask them to think REALLY hard if they want to go back or not.

thats why i proposed something that the vast majority of the "target audience" would not care about, or maybe even notice. the only context where 2% rdps matters is week 1 prog, speedkills and rank chasing in fflogs, and hardcore players are the last to complain about complexity.

Something I've learned in all my time playing MMOs for 2 decades now: People notice those changes. Hell, how much of the meta is DRIVEN by those changes? And how many people DOWNSTREAM from the meta (doing content where the meta doesn't even matter) believe that it does?

I remember running ZodEx in 6.0 and people telling me how WHM was broken and worthless, and I was like "Wait, what? It works just fine, it just does less damage than the others and will go OOM if there are long fights with no downtime." People running farm on an Extreme trial were worried because of WHM doing a bit less damage (maybe 1%) because Misery wasn't DPS neutral.

This is hardly unique. I remember some complaint about SAM (maybe?) not being good for a stretch in SB (it was fine, it just had less utility and its "selfish" nature didn't QUITE make up in damage for the lack of buffs), maybe something like 1-3% less damage. Yet people in PF for Extremes and such were denying spots to SAMs over this perception of it being weak or not viable.

Today, we have this same deal with people actively excluding MCH from PF and groups. MCH is, by the data, the weakest DPS Job by far...yet for all Extremes and in Savages, its lower contribution isn't sufficient to prevent clears, definitely not to prevent people playing it or finding groups. Yet the overall community position is that the Job is horrifically broken. I've even seen people say it's "griefing" or "trolling" to play it in parties. But in what world?

You know as well as I do that the downstream playerbase cares, even if there's zero reason for them to.

a historical example of what i mean is how ShB whm was more complex than EW whm because of how annoying keeping gcd uptime was in 5.X. But i doubt the vast majority of people who liked whm because its simple even cared or noticed the amount of effort that went into keeping 100% gcd uptime back then.

Not sure what you mean here, uptime is the same in EW as ShB. Unless you mean less weaving time because of Glare filing the GCD?

And if you DO mean that: I can assure you, that change was HIGHLY noticeable (and generally welcome)

would you feel like whm would be unenjoyably complex in my hypothetical where lilies also reduce the cd of assize by X seconds? the implication is that using lilies in downtime changes from a strict dps gain to a potential loss depending on the value of X and the amount of downtime. that would change optimal lily usage depending on fight and downtime. but i doubt the majority of players would care or even notice that fact.

That would probably be okay since all it does is make healing more powerful and everyone uses Assize on CD anyway. That wouldn't really add complexity, though: Getting Assize faster would be a DPS gain, so all it would mean is using Lilies in downtime would be even MORE of a DPS gain than it is now. This would just discourage cast GCD healing (mainly Medica 2)

[QooEr]

Not sure what you mean here, uptime is the same in EW as ShB. Unless you mean less weaving time because of Glare filing the GCD?

And if you DO mean that: I can assure you, that change was HIGHLY noticeable (and generally welcome)

i know the change felt welcome and was of course noticeable, but thats not my point. my point is this: if i had asked you how you felt about whm in shb, what would you have said? if i had asked you in stormblood, what would you had said? had the change to glare never happened, would you have thought whm desperately needed a 1.5s cast time on glare, or that it needed something like ruin ii? Did you stress over the lack of weave windows in shb, or did you just clip your gcd? did you plan out your lilies to get maximum value for mobility+double weave+healing? did you practice pre-positioning & try your hardest to slidecast on even the most movement heavy phases to keep 100% uptime?

just like the vast majority of whms in endwalker thought whm was totally fiiine despite having very obvious mana issues in longer fights (hint: its because they had bad gcd uptime), the vast majority of whm mains in shb did not in fact stress over gcd uptime and slidecasting, much less in any content lower than savage. you can call it jank or job depth but it was very real, and one of the main reasons lilies got so devalued in EW was because with the 1.5s cast times the go-to mobility & weaving tool (lilies) was no longer useful for any of that. thats why lossy afflatus misery was such a huge deal in EW but not in ShB. but i guarantee you that the majority of whms did not know all that, they probably just thought oh misery is a cool damage refund heehee blood for the blood lily.


switching to the healer i know best for more demonstration; giving 2 charges to draw had some very significant side effects on how AST plays cards. those of us who like theorycrafting and optimizing spotted it minutes after reading the media tour tooltips, while the vast majority of casual asts still use cards willy nilly. what giving charges to draw did was making it so it was optimal to hold 3 cards for raid buffs, making a change that would have probably been nice ("oh hey, i wont drift draw anymore!") into something that makes the entire job feel a lot worse ("oh great, now i have to cram like 6 ogcds into every divination window, meaning i have to hold lightspeed exclusively for burst and also largely ignore cards until the next repoener").

when i say they can add nuance to jobs that what you call "the downstream playerbase" would not notice, i absolutely mean it. its like... when sch could micromanage fairy embraces. it raised the skill ceiling incredibly, but having the fairy on autopilot was perfectly fine too for everyone who didnt want to do that. simple jobs can absolutely have things that seem simple or unnecessary but have more to it on a closer look.

That would probably be okay since all it does is make healing more powerful and everyone uses Assize on CD anyway. That wouldn't really add complexity, though: Getting Assize faster would be a DPS gain, so all it would mean is using Lilies in downtime would be even MORE of a DPS gain than it is now. This would just discourage cast GCD healing (mainly Medica 2)

if you burn lilies in downtime and reduce assize cd so much that you clip into the cooldown and lose uses of it, thats a damage loss. it absolutely would add more depth than "try to burn as many lilies in downtime as possible". you would also try to time lilies to manipulate the cd to fit assize into raid buffs, and thats just off the top of my head.