All DPS clears highlight a problem with encounter design in ShB

[ItMe]

if i can heal a fight And the mistakes with minimal gcds thats not really exciting

You feel like hardcasting heals is inherently more exciting? That those buttons are just, what, the fun ones to push?
I'm not really sure I can agree that making us heal with more GCDs = better design.

[ForteNightshade]

You feel like hardcasting heals is inherently more exciting? That those buttons are just, what, the fun ones to push?
I'm not really sure I can agree that making us heal with more GCDs = better design.

In a vacuum? No. Spamming Cure II is equally as boring as Glare. But as QooEr said earlier, it's the planning aspect that made GCD healing more interesting. In the past, we had significantly less tools to work with, thus you had to plan out where to use specific oGCDs.

Since I tank more than heal, I'll use that as a reference point. Cooldowns are essentially a button press but I enjoyed having to strategize their usage; if I use Vengeance now I won't have it for this buster. I can get a Feint there and use Rampant later. While it might seem like nothing. That small interaction with my cooldowns and potential coordination with the DPS made things more interesting. Nowadays, I barely pay attention to my CDs since I know I'll always have something given how infrequent busters are. Hell, Leviathan was so bad. If you didn't cheese his dash, you could literally throw Vengeance, Thrill and Rampant off your bar. Holmgang and Raw/Nascent could pretty much carry you through everything. Obviously, you'd still want to mitigate autos but that's about it.

This is even worse in normal mode. E2S literally does not have a tank buster. As a MT, you're just there to hold aggro and nothing else. The OT may as well be a fifth DPS. Healers feel similar in that they're gimped DPS more than healers. I appreciate they want to make things easy and "accessible." But there's such a thing as going to far. They haven't just crossed that line, in my opinion. They sailed over it full speed ahead.

[Gemina]

You feel like hardcasting heals is inherently more exciting? That those buttons are just, what, the fun ones to push?
I'm not really sure I can agree that making us heal with more GCDs = better design.

On the contrary, GCD healing is exactly how you make it engaging. I feel like this is the answer that is right in front of the dev's face: Increase the power of GCD heals, and reduce the power of ogcd heals. The meta is aimed at maximizing damage through efficient optimization of your tool kit, and because our ogcd heals are so powerful and we have so many, we are bored to tears with whack-a-mole healing while mindlessly spamming one of our two DPS GCD skills.

Healers right now are forced to smash button 1 because there is literally nothing else for them to do. With this change, you will force healers to have to use their GCDs on healing the party, and healing immediately becomes more interesting because with their ocgd heals exhausted, healers will no longer be able to comfortably allow health gauges to get as low as they do now. If the devs have to loosen up DPS checks, then frickin' do it.

[Semirhage]

On the contrary, GCD healing is exactly how you make it engaging.

Why on earth would forcing us to spam Cure over and over and over and over and over again be somehow more engaging than spamming Glare over and over and over and over and over again? The GCD kits aren't exactly engaging either.

[Morningstar1337]

Why on earth would forcing us to spam Cure over and over and over and over and over again be somehow more engaging than spamming Glare over and over and over and over and over again? The GCD kits aren't exactly engaging either.

I assume its because, With the mentality of healing as less as possible, it would force players to try to find windows of opportunity for their DPS again as opposed to seeing it with the frequency of Don Quixote seeing giants in windmills.

Also would bring more use to their other cooldowns like Horoscope and Temperance.

[Liam_Harper]

On the contrary, GCD healing is exactly how you make it engaging. I feel like this is the answer that is right in front of the dev's face: Increase the power of GCD heals, and reduce the power of ogcd heals. The meta is aimed at maximizing damage through efficient optimization of your tool kit, and because our ogcd heals are so powerful and we have so many, we are bored to tears with whack-a-mole healing while mindlessly spamming one of our two DPS GCD skills.

I'm not sure how this would make things more engaging with how low damage intake is right now. GcD heals are already quite strong, if you increased their power we could just Medica II each Raidwide, throw an occasional Regen on the tank and mash Glare for the rest of the fight. Also do we count damage neutral instant-cast Gcd's like Rapture as GcD's, because then even less changes. Damage just happens far too infrequently. Look at fights like e7s, where you spend the first 2 minutes barely needing a heal. If you force me to Medica II the Empty wave and maybe consider a Regen after the TB, then spam Glare for the rest I'm not going to suddenly feel engaged.

[Gemina]

I'm not sure how this would make things more engaging with how low damage intake is right now. GcD heals are already quite strong, if you increased their power we could just Medica II each Raidwide, throw an occasional Regen on the tank and mash Glare for the rest of the fight. Also do we count damage neutral instant-cast Gcd's like Rapture as GcD's, because then even less changes. Damage just happens far too infrequently. Look at fights like e7s, where you spend the first 2 minutes barely needing a heal. If you force me to Medica II the Empty wave and maybe consider a Regen after the TB, then spam Glare for the rest I'm not going to suddenly feel engaged.

This is talk right out of the echo chamber. How do you feel about mechanics that reduce HP to critical and inflict Doom like in Hades EX, or having to take big damage in order to remove a debuff like in E5S, or many other savage/EX encounters in the game? Don't talk like healing isn't required, while it doesn't scale correctly and ilv bloat will increase sustainability along with DPS this couldn't be more false. When players talk about increasing healing requirements, it specifically talks about raising the bar from wherever the standard is currently set for any particular encounter. It's not going to be same in all content.

Anywho, the idea is to make healers rely less on their ogcd heals. With these potency decreases and/or CD increases, healers would be forced to fall back on their GCD heals. The potency increases wouldn't be across the board, and would likely only affect their base ST and AoE heals. You can forget about regen taking care of the job as well. They would only restore enough HPS to assist the healing requirement. It becomes more engaging because for a job like WHM, you might not use PoM solely to increase the amount of Glares you dish out anymore. You'll have to think about it first instead of just mindlessly keeping it on CD.

The only problem with this I see is the reluctance to accept it from both the devs and players alike. You've already shown your own objection to the idea using one of the worst fights to encompass the healing requirements of the entire game. Do you want healing to be more engaging as a healer, or not? Anyone whose fallback is to just give us more DPS buttons to push is just defaulting; just like the devs when it comes to the design of healer jobs. The way you engage healers is to push their heals. This is simply a matter of the devs growing some freaking balls, and just doing it. Coddling the lowest common denominator has got to stop.

You have to understand that healing right now is at the point where it would be easier for the devs to cave and get rid of the role than it is to actually fix it. We are not far off from being healers by name only, and they need to turn the ship around before their simplification has an adverse effect, and the only healers left to do Savage are all the ones who have been handed their clears.

[Liam_Harper]

This is talk right out of the echo chamber. How do you feel about mechanics that reduce HP to critical and inflict Doom like in Hades EX, or having to take big damage in order to remove a debuff like in E5S, or many other savage/EX encounters in the game?

Hades Doom debuff is great, though not sure what you're talking about in e5s? Stormcloud isn't that bad. The fight overall is slightly more interesting than e6+7 to heal. But I'd like more Doom's, Almagests, ticking DoTs that need to be watched and so on. E7S could easily have added a heavy aoe bleed DoT somewhere in P1.

I'm not entirely disagreeing, but I fail to see how heavily nerfing oGcD heals alone but making no change to any fight design will suddenly fix everything? Sure, some fights might get a little more interesting, like e5, but you'll still have the e6s, e7s, Titana, Inno and so on with those huge gaps where literally no healing is needed and you're back to Glare spam. I still feel Medica II's would cover nearly everything in a lot of cases.

Anyone whose fallback is to just give us more DPS buttons to push is just defaulting; just like the devs when it comes to the design of healer jobs. The way you engage healers is to push their heals.

I'm not sure you read all my post? I'm not pushing for moar dps (though a few extra buttons wouldn't hurt), I'm saying the fights with huge downtime should also throw more threats at us that demand healing and that needs changing too.

But sure, I'm interested. Maybe list all the changes you'd make to potency for one of the healers to illustrate the point?

[AdamFyi]

When players talk about increasing healing requirements, it specifically talks about raising the bar from wherever the standard is currently set for any particular encounter. It's not going to be same in all content.

This is an inherent problem when it comes to Healing in general. Increasing healing requirements does not serve to fix the problem with the lack of incoming damage. Pushing damage intensity too far up just forces Healers to play almost perfectly to function at the minimum item level, which is almost impossible for the average player. Similarly, pushing for more frequency on the incoming damage too far does the same thing.

Always consider how it would impact the encounter and player resources. If we push for less downtime between incoming damage, then it punishes heavily for any mistakes made i.e. raised with no MP and 25% weakness, or any KO’s in general with the heavy cost on Raise spells. Granted, stacking as much Piety as humanely possible and dumping them as you get better gear may possibly end up being the trend (hmm..). It isn’t going to fix the Healers—they’re just not designed to be able to accommodate high frequency & high intensity sustained healing for an extended period of time.

[ItMe]

Hahahah wow...
Looks like they had to add a cutscenes there just so the healers MP and cooldowns could recover