A summary of healer issues

[ty_taurus]

Right, but let's take me as an example. I find EX roulettes boring as sin, they're not fun they're not challenging and I can do them with just 1/3 of my skills. Not just 'I don't need any GCD heals' but 'I don't need half of my OGCDs either'. I'm not the only person who feels this way about EX roulettes, I'm sure. So we have a quandary.

To mangle a quote from an ex-SE IP (they sold it to try and get into NFTs, that went well):

'Consider a two-sided coin. If the coin lands heads side up, SE make the EX roulette more challenging on healing, to keep me and players like me on our toes, with the side effect that some of the less skilled players in there get blown up and wipe (causing player friction). On the other hand, if it lands on it's reverse, they leave it alone because 'thats casual content', and me/players like me who do Savage and sometimes Ultimates are forever damned to only find enjoyment in 4 instances every 8 months, interspersed with one instance on a separate staggered 8 month interval.

But suppose you flip the coin enough times, that one day, it lands on it's edge...'

Even with something as obviously 'there are only two ways it can go' as a coin flip, there's actually a third option. So, will SE take the 'third option' here, is the question

Giving every job the optional Auto-Battle (Single Target) and Auto-Battle (Multi Target) button would at least address the DPS side of that coin. You have the freedom to expand healer DPS tools to around 8~10 buttons or so, and anyone who does not feel comfortable performing that manually will get everything they really need to clear content with Auto-Battle. Certain jobs may not compliment Auto-Battle very well, like AST probably wouldn't regardless of whatever they might do with its cards, but each role would have at least 1 job where their combat loop is relatively friendly to Auto-Battle, and the difference between an Auto-Battle using Warrior and a manual-play Warrior might just be the difference between something like Dragon Kick Combo Monk and normal rotation Monk currently. Even with something like 8~10 DPS buttons, WHM would probably end up in that same spot. You still need to manually heal since the Auto-Battle is just for GCD attacks, but now every healer of either camp has 4 healers to choose from.

Some might not like the pandering to the lowest common denominator that this system does, but I would much rather have the jobs actually grow and expand on their moment-to-moment gameplay if the bargaining chip is letting players have access to an easy button that does a bulk of the work for them than watch each expansion continue down this warpath of homogenizing and aggressively simplifying everything.

[Shurrikhan]

Giving every job the optional Auto-Battle (Single Target) and Auto-Battle (Multi Target) button would at least address the DPS side of that coin. You have the freedom to expand healer DPS tools to around 8~10 buttons or so, and anyone who does not feel comfortable performing that manually will get everything they really need to clear content with Auto-Battle.

Sorry for the tangent, but... does anyone have any sort of mental picture of how this would look in the game -- specifically, without it feeling 'tacked on' and out of place?

(Not saying it would necessarily be the result; just constraining the ideas that seem worth mentioning. If it wouldn't possibly feel right, it's probably not a route worth going with, after all.)

For instance, I... wouldn't necessarily hate it if there was literally an Auto-battle mode in the game, for everyone... at least, assuming it'd only have a very basic, fight-agnostic AI for handling a long-term, bank-stuff-for-as-long-as-possible approach. But at that point the sort of natural state of things would look very different.

It'd make no sense then, for instance, to still have a unique button for each action, only for each fork, so to speak. You'd be looking at points of intelligent departure for optimization, not the maintenance of the basic flow of 1-2-3 or glare-glare-glare.

Sorry, just food for thought.