Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[ForsakenRoe]

A quick look at "the site that shall not be named" shows that a lot of the complaints are coming from people who do savage, but even if they weren't it still wouldn't invalidate said complaints.

Players who don't do any of the harder content probably have even more reason to complain about the current state because their entire gameplay experience consists of being bored. The content they do shows the atrocious design in it's bare state, what the job gameplay actually looks like once all the boss mechanic density and coordinated dancing from savage and ultimate have been stripped away.

It's basically like... How to explain it. Hm. Let's take Bard as an example. You can do EX roulette by just spamming Burst Shot, not using songs buffs or DOTs, just spamming 1 over and over. In Savage you have to learn your full rotation cos of enrage timers, right? So BRD is okay and not in this situation, because when someone is 'good' at Bard, and uses their full rotation to clear Savage, they can still use that full rotation in the lower stress EX roulette and have some fun there too. Nothing stops the player from using as much, or as little, of the BRD rotation to get through the lower level content, and that's fine. Good even, because not everyone is going to know the rotation for the class, not everyone goes to the Balance to look it up

By putting all of the 'fun' as being derived from 'how hard do I need to heal' for healers, Savage prog is fun, sure. But as we learn the fights better and better, less mistakes occur, mit becomes more consistent, gear goes up, we have to heal less. And that removes the 'fun' for us. And in lower content like EX roulette, if we're used to the 'amount of healing required' in Savage, we never get that in the EX roulette. Essentially, the devs swapped the source of fun from 'the class itself' to 'the content you're doing' for healers, and that means that if the content is lacking, the class cannot make up for it. If we had a Tank-esque damage rotation, we would still have something to 'have fun' with even in lower content. Instead, we are given one DOT, one spam skill, and if we're lucky, something on a 40-60s CD to throw in burst. Only AST gets to have something more, and that something causes me RSI so it's not ideal. In BRD terms, it'd be like saying 'the more gear you get, the more you're FORCED to use Burst Shot instead of OGCDs or buffs'. It's not a choice for healers, if we can replace a healing GCD because it'd be overheal, we either use our one spam skill, or we overheal to no effect except wasting MP.

The devs are averse to the idea of 'give healers a more involved rotation' because 'it would be stressful to keep up with for new healer' or 'new healer would feel forced to use damage' or whatever excuse, but there's solutions to that. Like I've said many times, balance potencies so that the difference between 'full optimal' and 'spam Glare' is really close (I got my suggestion down to a difference of 160 potency per minute difference, for example). It should also be clarified, I'm not even asking for like, GNB speed for the healers. I've seen one person over in healer discussion made a SGE idea that plays a bit closer to GNB in speed, but personally, I'd be happy with them all just getting up to parity with WAR. If you condense it's 123 down, it'd have Path, Eye, FC, Infuriate, Inner Release, Inner Chaos, Primal Rend, Onslaught and Upheaval. WHM, by contrast, has Glare, Dia, Misery, Solace/Rapture (to prep misery), Presence of Mind. My suggestion is simple: Add a 15s cooldown GCD called Water (later Banish) that is 40p stronger than Glare, and rescale Dia to be 12s instead of 30s. If they want to go further, re-add Cleric Stance as a 60s CD selfbuff of 5-10% damage, ala Trick Attack for NIN. (full info on that idea can be found here) That would make the gameplay look like this, and because I think the graphs illustrate it better than words ever could, a 1min loop of our current GCD uses, and of 'my proposed fully optimal, dump everything in raidbuffs' rotation, can be seen both on the linked post, and I'll drop them here too for accessibility:

Think of the classes as the lenses of a pair of glasses, through which we see all the content. It doesn't matter if the landscape you're looking at is beautiful, if your glasses are scratched and dirty, because all you'll see is scratches and dirt.

[ty_taurus]

It should also be clarified, I'm not even asking for like, GNB speed for the healers. I've seen one person over in healer discussion made a SGE idea that plays a bit closer to GNB in speed, but personally, I'd be happy with them all just getting up to parity with WAR.

That would be me. Hi, how are ya?

To be more specific, the tanks each have different paces at which they perform their rotations. WAR is simple and slow, easy to play and easy to understand. PLD is more technical and slow--it has more moving pieces to its rotation that aren't immediately obvious on how to use them optimally. DRK is simple and fast; the rotation is very similar to WAR's, but with a potluck of OGCDs to manage. GNB is more technical(ish) and fast. Its GCD rotation isn't rocket science, but it does have more moving pieces, and it has less OGCDs than DRK, but it uses them often. Now, the tanks aren't perfect. WAR, for example, I've seen arguments suggesting it's a little too simple right now, and over in the feedback document I've seen desire to see Butcher's Block return in some capacity and something else to spend your gauge on now that Upheaval and Onslaught don't cost gauge anymore, but you actually have modest variety in the gameplay between them. I just want to see the healers be treated the same.

In that respect, I'd like SGE to be the GNB healer because there is clearly a demand for a very DPS-focused healer. Potencies can be reduced to make room for an expanded rotation, but you can take advantage of both Kardia and Eukrasia to enable SGE to have room for both an expansive DPS rotation while still having the healing it needs to keep up with the other healers.

[ForsakenRoe]

In that respect, I'd like SGE to be the GNB healer because there is clearly a demand for a very DPS-focused healer. Potencies can be reduced to make room for an expanded rotation, but you can take advantage of both Kardia and Eukrasia to enable SGE to have room for both an expansive DPS rotation while still having the healing it needs to keep up with the other healers.

To follow on from this, what is also something that is important to note with this, is that we refer to the DPS side of things, the 'downtime' where we are not healing. When people make healer ideas, it seems we always have one thing in mind: always keep the 'oh bugger we have to spam GCD heals now' tools like Medica, or Succor, or whatever, super accessible. The idea is that optimizing your DPS should be a fun challenging task, but if things start going wrong, you should have easy access to the tools that prevent the wipe. Low skill floor, High skill ceiling. In this case, I don't remember the exact details on Ty's version, but I think we both had Prognosis (the Medica equivalent) be not only 'still there' in our respective Sage ideas, but also cost zero MP because of the rest of the design using MP very differently. As such, a panicking, casual player can spam that skill till the cows come home to prevent the wipe if needs be.

also hi

[ty_taurus]

To follow on from this, what is also something that is important to note with this, is that we refer to the DPS side of things, the 'downtime' where we are not healing. When people make healer ideas, it seems we always have one thing in mind: always keep the 'oh bugger we have to spam GCD heals now' tools like Medica, or Succor, or whatever, super accessible. The idea is that optimizing your DPS should be a fun challenging task, but if things start going wrong, you should have easy access to the tools that prevent the wipe. Low skill floor, High skill ceiling. In this case, I don't remember the exact details on Ty's version, but I think we both had Prognosis (the Medica equivalent) be not only 'still there' in our respective Sage ideas, but also cost zero MP because of the rest of the design using MP very differently. As such, a panicking, casual player can spam that skill till the cows come home to prevent the wipe if needs be.

also hi

In addition, I had my version of Diagnosis and Prognosis have higher potencies on party members with barriers applied to them. The key is establishing a safety net on the healing side of things to ensure that actually recovering from a messy situation does not feel like an uphill battle for the average player. Because these also come at a loss of damage, it means it isn't optimal to heal this way if you can avoid it, which prevents these safety nets from overpowering your other healing resources.

In addition to making basic heals safety nets for new or learning healers, another thing I've talked about wanting done to help allow the healing role to be forgiving on the healing side is reworking Phoenix Downs as items. This includes the following steps:
1. Make Phoenix Downs usable in combat with an independent 2 or 3 minute cooldown (per person).
2. Allow players to carry more than 1 (the item would be stackable in your inventory like most other items and potions).
3. Make using Phoenix Downs instant cast, but on the GCD. If the healer dies, another party member can get you up right away in case healing is needed.
4. Add a 'disable Phoenix Down' effect that applies to high-end duties and can be selected as Duty Finder option alongside minimum ilevel and silence echo. This avoids any concerns of this breaking savage content.
5. If needed, includes a free Phoenix Down with one of your roulette rewards, and possibly as a role in need reward, to help ensure most players have them in their inventory.

This allows especially new healers to make mistakes in combat and not either force a wipe and be denied the ability to continue the fight. I don't think "boost tank and DPS sustain levels to 11 so that if the healer dies, they get to rot on the ground while everyone else plays the game" is the healthy way to address the greater responsibility healers have for not dying.