Can we get a rework of healers for 6.0

[QooEr]

That's the main thrust of my posts 100%. In no place have I drawn attention to the fact that fight design is part of the problem.

i apologize i wasnt saying it specifically at you, idk why i quote replied in hindsight.

btw agree with you too ablut the healing and dps kits, they could and should synergize better and more interestingly. i just wanted to bring into attention the fact that making healers heal more wouldnt be as boring as others have been making it out to be

[Ultimatecalibur]

I'm reacting to that sentiment, right there. Yeah, having a damage kit that consists of Dia -> Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare
pssssh, that's just fight design, what am I talking about.

It is a flaw in Fight design when the White Mage's gcd rotation is supposed to be more like this:

Regen -> Dia -> Cure -> Cure -> Proced Cure 2 -> Glare -> Medica 2 -> Medica -> Regen -> Glare -> Cure -> Cure -> Solace -> Dia -> etc...

All three healer's dps rotations are designed to be intermixed into their healing when they have some free space. Even the inclusion of a small spell -> big spell combo wouldn't really work if you are only casting damaging spells every 3rd or 4th gcd. If fights were designed properly you wouldn't have room to cast Glare twice in a row which would be necessary for dps spell combos to be a good addition.

What you are seeing with the Glare spam is the result of combat rarely needing the healing output the rotation intends so that Glare starts filling up all the free space that would have been healing spells making a fairly varied rotation into a something monotonous.

[Maltothoris]

Well there's even no need for the cure use in the rotation for 2 reasons. One is something that many others have pointed out and it's that the scaling of cure 1 really starts to show at lvl 64 I believe. At lvl 80, cure 1 heals only heals 21k where in cure 2s heal at 33k which is about 60 percent stronger than what a cure 1. Next is that the freecure proc is a trap because the chance of it happening is too low at 15 percent which you have only a 1 in 6 chance of happen so you can't never rely on it, especially now that WHM doesn't need it since the changes to lucid dreaming, assize on a 45 second timer and the amazing spell that is thin air.

This rotation is also ignoring some of the Whm's ogcds that they have in tetra and bension plus ignoring what your cohealer could do as well with a sch having excog in hand or a astro using celestial intersection or essential dignity with either sect in mind. Healers just have so many tools at healing now that spamming any cure is just redundant at this point. This isn't the days of where there was a main healer and off healer like there was back in late ARR or early HW. Both healers using their kit together trivializes so much of all the fights.

[owolett]

Healers are never ever going to do something like you suggest unless damage is going out VERY frequently and you struggled with MP so you actually use Cure I (bleh). Even still I'm 100% sure that most healers would still be prioritising their oGCD tools - it's just what's optimal if you want to make the most contribution to your party. That kind of thing also becomes difficult to do when you factor in movement and mechanics - you can't always stand still and spam heals, and your party isn't always stacked together so sometimes there's delay since your AoE heals propagate. If healers were required to always be hard casting GCDs to heal damage it makes it harder to design mechanics the way they currently are. Besides, another poster already pointed out fights that do indeed challenge healers to use their full toolkit without going full healbot.

There's also the issue with story/normal mode content. A friend of mine quit the game because he started the game on CNJ and was literally just spamming rocks. Pressing two buttons for 80 levels straight shouldn't be accepted. For group content, SE will never actually up the healing requirements for normal mode content for fear it'll be too difficult. People die all the time in Alliance Raids. Furthermore, healing Extreme/Savage is not easy when you first learn the game and before gear levels get high. SE also for some reason stubbornly refuses to make targetting easier for PC players (mouseover). You only need to look at how they made AST's mana management so much easier even though the job was already overtuned and it wasn't even that hard in the first place.

Yes we shouldn't always appeal to the lowest common denominator, but the issue is that healing is a requirement otherwise your party dies. Before content with actual DPS checks you have more responsibility than DPS players. A terrible healer can wipe the party at any point but a bad DPS will only wipe the party during enrage. It's binary in nature - your party either dies or they don't. If they don't you continue with DPS.

That's why people are suggesting that healers have slightly more ways to optimise their DPS and have more interesting toolkits that actually feel like proper job mechanics rather than all being very similar. It's something that raises skill cap but keeps the accessibility of learning a job. Spamming the current healing buttons as you suggest isn't really that interesting when they don't even have any depth or synergise with the rest of the toolkit and they are quite literally all the same between the healers.

[Side-Eye]

I'm just tired of spamming the same two DPS skills over and over. Since we know Squeenix isn't going to create content which requires full-time heals, my only wish is that we receive additional DPS options -- and for AST, cards are still too much button mashing for the benefit.

[YusiKha]

It is a flaw in Fight design when the White Mage's gcd rotation is supposed to be more like this...

You realise that if fights actually required constant intense healing like that the entire casual playerbase, who struggle to have casting uptime above 60%, would immediately be unable to clear fights due to the sheer amount of incoming damage. That a minor lagspike or server delay would have the potential to outright kill someone with no way of countering it?

[Lyth]

I'm not really sure why all healing 'must' exist in a binary world where spells are either instantaneous or occur after a five-hour long cast. The great thing about spells is that you can set the cast times as whatever you want. Spells have a resource cost and a time cost. That's where all the decision-making happens. You don't expect your spells to all cost 0 MP. That's would be pretty boring. Why do we expect our healing spells to have no cast time?

We were talking about how much satisfaction healers get out of making a clutch save where we rescue our team from the brink. But if everything is resolved without cast times, there is no brink. You either press the button or you don't. There's no room for reactive decision-making or triage. There's no fear of "will I get this cast off in time". It's just pure rote memorization and spreadsheet puzzles.

Healing challenges don't have to be any more binary than dps ones are. It doesn't have to be snoozefest or wipe. Individual player deaths result in your raid dps dropping off, resulting in a slower attrition. You just need to create situations where if they want to play more aggressively and pop off, then you need to support them and keep them alive through the additional risks that they take.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for interesting and fun dps mechanics. But if you treat healing like it's your side job, then you're acknowledging that what DPS do as a role is inherently superior to yours. This isn't Heavensward. Never again will you be allowed to outdps your BRD while your fairy keeps your team alive - even if they are mostly AFK while doing auto-attack damage. And even if your only motivation is to push your own limits, you're always going to have a less interesting dps rotation than real damage dealing jobs. That's a given - you have less available actions to allocate to doing damage because of the other parts of your kit.

Rather than feeling like healing is "holding you back" from doing damage, the two should synergise with each other. There are lots of ways to do this. Do damage to drain MP and allow you to cast more healing spells or maybe even to speed up your healing casting speed as a sort of yin and yang. Use more abilities that simultaneously damage the enemy and heal nearby party members. If you're going to hand out a raid damage buff, perhaps couple it to a defensive buff as well.

I also think there's more room for healer variety if you further subdivide the two healer slots, much like they had originally proposed to do with tanks this expansion. It would be interesting to see an aura-based healer as a sort of off-healer/flex-support slot. I was originally hoping before the Shadowbringers announcement that DNC would have addressed this niche as a melee range healer with area buffs, but anyways. Point being, it doesn't have to be all whack-a-mole healing or even worse, shield at phase transition and then dps for the rest of the phase. This is certainly not new ground for MMOs/MOBAs/etc. so all you really need to do is look around and steal a few ideas.

I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with instant cast heals on their own. My favourite heal spell of any game is Guild Wars' (circa 2004) Transfuse Health, where you donate half your life bar to another player as an instant cast. But you really have to place limitations on their availability, and you need content that pushes you to not rely on it as a crutch for slow reaction times and weak on the fly decision-making. If you want healing to become interesting again, you really do need to make healing interesting again. No way around it.

[Irenia]

There are many things that both the devs and the players seem to be stuck on that prevents healing to be interesting. We all obsess over class balance and "Bring the Player not the Job", for example. I think the biggest thing is that many players, DPS especially, like the "memorize and execute planned actions" method of difficulty this game uses. Indeed, when people say things like "I thought this was a farm party," they not only expect that their allies to memorize the script, they show that they do not want to deal with uncertainty.

If the devs and playerbase can embrace uncertainty, then healing for healing sake can be applied. Until then, every job is a DPS, that occasionally presses other buttons to not wipe.

[YusiKha]

There are many things that both the devs and the players seem to be stuck on that prevents healing to be interesting. We all obsess over class balance and "Bring the Player not the Job", for example. I think the biggest thing is that many players, DPS especially, like the "memorize and execute planned actions" method of difficulty this game uses. Indeed, when people say things like "I thought this was a farm party," they not only expect that their allies to memorize the script, they show that they do not want to deal with uncertainty.

If the devs and playerbase can embrace uncertainty, then healing for healing sake can be applied. Until then, every job is a DPS, that occasionally presses other buttons to not wipe.

That's great and all but healers as DPS has worked for all this time so why change a willing formula and embrace our roles as healer-dps by giving us more dps actions?

[Irenia]

That's great and all but healers as DPS has worked for all this time so why change a willing formula and embrace our roles as healer-dps by giving us more dps actions?

I'd be fine with that. I'd just wish that the team would choose one or the other. Are we healers who DPS on the side? Or are we DPS who heal on the side?