Dear Square Enix, do something with GCD healing please.

[Liam_Harper]

How is that any different from what we have now? Do you just want healing to solely be oGCD (assuming you mean abilities, not spells, here) and we spend even more time just turreting?

I did mention before I'd be fine with healing almost solely being oGCD. But that's no reason to become a turret, you replace the GCD heals with more DPS. You then have engaging dps and a strong healing kit that needs to be planned and involves thought due to cooldowns and can't be blindly spammed.

Similar to now, but blind Medica II spam is no longer possible and the dps aspect is more interesting.

[Shurrikhan]

I did mention before I'd be fine with healing almost solely being oGCD. But that's no reason to become a turret, you replace the GCD heals with more DPS. You then have engaging dps and a strong healing kit that needs to be planned and involves thought due to cooldowns and can't be blindly spammed.

Similar to now, but blind Medica II spam is no longer possible and the dps aspect is more interesting.

Again, no one's going to Medica II spam anyways, so that matter is moot. Toxicon, Clemency, and the ability to cast more than one TBN per 2 minutes would each be as deserving of removal as the ability to "spam" Medica II.

By all means, find more button-efficient ways of meeting Medica II's applicable capacity or decision-making (and, ideally, make its niche more often useful if you're going to bother with such), but it's not as if Medica II spam is some dire threat we need be rid of. I haven't even seen the skill cast more than once in the last year despite still seeing as many WHMs as SGEs (and more of either than SCH or AST).

I wouldn't mind trading out some/many GCD healing options for offensive actions (so long as those offensive actions aren't more convolution/bloat than complexity/depth), but I'd rather first...

1. Increase the "sustained" or otherwise "non-critical" damage dealt during encounters. Such wouldn't increase the difficulty of healing much despite making the role feel more relevant.
2. Consolidate more obvious forms of bloat. (AST provides plenty of examples, as does Aetherflow even being a thing when compared against SGE's system. Arguably, Lilies as an entire system, as compared to just automatic cast-completion upon movement for Cure II and Medica that'd consume a granular, time-generated resource, is also bloat.)
3. Rework or trim more uniquely redundant and lackluster skills (such as previously iconic skills like Celestial Opposition that are now just an oGCD version of a GCD skill).
4. Make resources that currently seem barely useful (Fairy gauge, Lilies now that their damage cost has increased, etc.) more appealing -- not just in terms of relative potency, but also gameplay.

Even after that, I'd like to see what we can do to intertwine curative/buffing and offensive systems interestingly that would neither oblige wasteful healing nor simply go (more obviously) the way of Green DPS.

If none of that gets skipped over and the added choices don't end up essentially just following a bloated rotation a la tanks or (gag) Dragoon, then I'm all for more DPS buttons and am plenty willing to sacrifice some healing GCD keys to get them. I just want to make sure we're not forgetting the cake for the icing here.

[Semirhage]

I never said healer downtime has to be dull. I merely pointed out that giving it n rigid steps, up from 1 -- sacrificing n-1 further actions to support it or giving every healer a greater button count than a modern, unconsolidated AST -- isn't going to fix that.

To make healer downtime interesting there needs to be significant and variable cost. That doesn't mean Cure spam. That doesn't mean Cure II spam. That does, however, mean stretches of synergetic offensive action and/or particular moments at which the value of offense is greater than typical and which we therefore want to make room for. DoTs significantly more powerful than our filler actions, for instance, provide that variable offensive cost for healing. But, of course, that variability only matters if preparing for those offensive GCDs actually takes a degree of skill.

Put simply, how interesting healer "downtime" is depends at least as much on the complexity of its "uptime".

(Simply giving healers the tank combo treatment, on the other hand, isn't likely to do a damn thing beyond button bloat.)

And what I'm saying is, every single time someone here even whispers that downtime should be more interesting, there's always a dismissive retort about "tank combo treatment" as if every person who ever suggested making downtime kits more interesting just wants combos or something.

Some people in the subforum do. I'm not one of them.

[Shurrikhan]

And what I'm saying is, every single time someone here even whispers that downtime should be more interesting, there's always a dismissive retort about "tank combo treatment" as if every person who ever suggested making downtime kits more interesting just wants combos or something.

Some people in the subforum do. I'm not one of them.

Thank you for the quick and frank clarification. I had not meant to accuse you of wanting tank combos or the like. Rather, in the context of others in this very thread asking for a rotation of skills, your interpretation of the quote in your post which I had responded to seemed odd to me so I offered my own as an alternative (though I perhaps read too far into its potential relation to the thread's original post).

To attempt a very quick summary of a string of posts that I've doubtless missed at least some of the complexity behind, it read to me like:

1. Kabooa: "Tank no-CD/no-constraint 123 combos are likewise filler."
2. Thorne: "Why mention this?"
3. Kabooa: "How we fix that 'filler' is just as important as that we recognize that it should be fixed. However, differences in how we define filler will change how we attempt to correct it. (If we see a tank filler as any different, fundamentally, from healer filler, then that suggests that merely throwing more buttons at the issue, rather than competing decisions, contexts, the like, would be a sufficient solution. It is not.)"
4. You: "You make it sound like filler is unfixable and we should therefore just deal with it."

At which point I suggested that the meaning was less likely that "We should just deal with filler being filler" than "Filler can't be made to feel less like filler simply by giving it more actions" (i.e., a clarification of viable solutions, not a suggestion that no solutions exist).

If I had misread that chain of reasoning, I apologize.

[Visanis]

You claim it would be a disaster but that's kind of how it was in Coils back in ARR. We didn't have the plethora of oGCD healing abilities back then and had to actually utilize your GCD for Healing/Shielding as appropriate. Sure, there was moments of levity to throw on Cleric Stance and do some DPS but it's not as though you could do that for 80% of an encounter and be fine like you can today. If it was possible back then, then I fail to see why it would suddenly be impossible now, especially given that every role now has much more group utility than they did back then.

The thing is, even back in ARR things were being solo healed by SCH.

Yes, it required more GCD heals because that's all they had outside of the fairy and lustrate, but it was still possible.

[Silver-Strider]

The thing is, even back in ARR things were being solo healed by SCH.

Yes, it required more GCD heals because that's all they had outside of the fairy and lustrate, but it was still possible.

Again, the only point I was trying to make was that it was doable with our GCD toolkit back then so I fail to see why it would suddenly be impossible to do now.

[QooEr]

Again, the only point I was trying to make was that it was doable with our GCD toolkit back then so I fail to see why it would suddenly be impossible to do now.

we gcd healed more, AND we had more to do during downtime too. i really dont understand why players and devs alike somewhere along the way started thinking that its impossible to break from this new status quo where all we do is use a single dps button 160+ times in 1 fight and heal everything else with ogcds.

[Saefinn]

I do feel like the biggest shame with healing is that we don't typically get full use of our kit. And I know that if I end up playing SGE optimally then I'm going to be mostly oGCD focused and that would in effect make skills like "Toxicon" rarely used. Otherwise, I think Toxicon could be a step in the right direction and would fit with SGE's theme and that's where your DPS aids your healing, if you had a great DPS incentive on Toxicon, you will find that your SGE's will not play "how low can you go" to optimize their heals, because their optimisation then will be tied behind keeping people shielded...which I am pretty sure is exactly what the devs want people to do with SGE to fulfill this pure/shield healer relationship. All those people complaining that healers don't heal enough and risk too much and let people die for that extra DPS will love having SGEs.

And then they can add more incentives to other jobs. Maybe other ways of pushing DPS potential out of GCD's. Because at the end of the day, we don't use GCD's as much because they're an overall DPS loss.

Alternatively, if the incoming damage was big and frequent enough they we could burn through our oGCD's more and use GCD's more to complement them, that could work too. I think this is the case for those still learning to play and optimise the job. Like me trying to improve on SGE and with me starting out, my GCD's were complementary. However, this change would make it harder for low end healers if done to a degree higher end healers are engaged.

That said, tying a DPS incentive to using them I think is going to incentivise people regardless of skill then & the better option. And the beauty? They don't have to add new DPS kit to do this, because those heals end up being treated as part of the person's "DPS mode".

Then oGCD's might be better in tighter situations, or complementary to your GCD's, offer mobility when needed, can be weaved when needed or be used to handle specific mechanics they're useful for. This would be a fuller use of the kit IMO and lends to a busier feel and maybe less of a single button spam for DPS mode as of present.

I think having dual purposes to certain abilities too is a way of getting continuous use of your full kit, I remember back in ShB I did write up a SCH concept that would not add a single new ability, yet through offering certain abilities more dual-purpose, it was able to make use of a wider range of skills during downtime and having your healing kit ready for your up time. SGE somewhat uses similar ideas just not to the same extent I was suggesting, but it was a Eukrasia-like mechanic.

[Commander_Justitia]

Seems like healers really need 1 hard fight where they have to heal 98% of the time with almost no opportunity to dps because you would run out of MP otherwise. I think then the complaining about more effecient heal skills that basically do the same, would vanish.

[Charganium]

Seems like healers really need 1 hard fight where they have to heal 98% of the time with almost no opportunity to dps because you would run out of MP otherwise. I think then the complaining about more effecient heal skills that basically do the same, would vanish.

If the healing requirements were that strict no one would be able to clear but the top 1% of players, so it wouldn't make the other 99% any happier with their kit.