Quote Originally Posted by Renathras View Post
There will be people bored no matter what, but for people playing content designed for their skill level, the answer is a lot less. Ex 5 is an Extreme yet there's a point in that fight where there's something like 45-60 seconds with no unavoidable damage. You think that's a good idea for fight design?

The across the board argument is the problem. You would need a full on DPS role (not "DPS at home") rotation before many people would not be bored running casual content. That's always going to be true. The answer is simply to give people that are more hardcore more hardcore content to run instead for their farms. Even WoW has normal dungeons and LFR difficulty raids, and did even back when healers were designed to not use DPS abilities in groups (high Mana costs making them prohibitive).

Not every Job needs an Oath/Beast/Blood/Dragon/Ninki/Kinki/Shroud/Battery/WH-BLMana/Faerie Gauge that goes from 0-100 and has a spender that costs 50. Please no. We need the ones that currently exist to have interesting uses before we add more. Beast/Blood/Dragoon/Ninki/and mostly Kinki already are almost identical (blow during burst, don't overcap, spenders cost 50 each) to the point they're extremely samey. Let's not get more of that. Find ways to make Faerie Gauge legitimately useful first.
No, I don't think having such massive gaps in unavoidable damage is necessarily a good thing for fight design, but consider that it's not because the boss is doing nothing, he's doing multiple instances of avoidable damage. Dodging those avoidable attacks feels good because 'I'm helping the healer by not taking this damage, so they don't have to worry about saving me from death constantly'. The ratio of avoidable/unavoidable damage might need some work, but just making there be more 'unavoidable damage' might actually be a worse feeling overall. Imagine every 5 seconds, Golbez stomps his foot and a shockwave does 10k damage to everyone. It's 'unavoidable damage', it eventually stacks up, it gets to the point where it's a threat in combination with an avoidable mechanic (eg it drops people low enough that failing to dodge the halfroom slice would kill), but it sure as hell isn't going to be creating 'interesting gameplay'.

Again you claim people like me would need DPS-Adjacent levels of complexity, despite all the times to the contrary. Oh well. As for the 'solution' here, lmao, simply. 'Instead of the dev time of giving more hardcore players an extra section of the job kit to optimize (something that takes dev time for expansion launch and, if well balanced, can be left alone for the whole expansion), we should instead be giving them more content, that takes more dev time from the whole team, and requires that time every patch because players can eat through content faster than devs can cook it up'. Why didn't any of us think of that? If you mean that there should be more 'midcore' content to act as a bridge into Savage since one EX trial every 4 months isn't cutting it, yeh agreed but that's not the point here.

For gauges, yes it sucks that certain gauges have one use and exactly one use. But that's SE's fault for not capitalizing on them more. Beast is a good example. It used to be used for Upheaval and Overpower, but some people who were not good at WAR complained so hard that 'it sucks to use the gauge for the gapcloser also it's a damage loss waaah' that now we have to spam 3 of them in raidbuffs and the gauge is now only used on FC. WHM having a 0-100 gauge barely even counts as an issue IMO, because it's current gauge is so hollow as it is. Functionally, you could just have Solace say 'has 3 charges, 20s recharge time, shares a CD with Rapture' and vice versa, and its the same thing, just with a pretty flower picture to show it. Adding an extra gauge would take a bit of dev time, art team has to draw a pretty version etc, but it opens doors to actually have more interesting things. An AOE heal is the suggestion, yes, but there's other things that could be added to also spend gauge on. Maybe shields, maybe a more powerful regen effect, maybe mitigations. Also, you know that the Fairy gauge is a second gauge on SCH right? We have Aetherflow gauge too. So it's not like there's zero precedent for adding a second gauge element to a healer. And yes, I would like to see Fairy gauge get more uses. But the current lack of uses of that gauge, doesn't immediately lock us out from other things on an entirely separate class, especially one who's only gauge can be turned off entirely and still play almost identically.

Also, while Beast and Blood are very similar (because DRK became WAR2 after all), Ninki had previously a cost of 80 iirc for TCJ (now removed), Kenki used to have Kaiten at 20 Seigan at 15 Guren at 50. Two are removed, and one's been reduced to 25, equal to Shinten. Dragoon's gauge doesn't even 'spend' anything, it displays a timer. But basically you're asking for Stormblood back