The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[Shurrikhan]

Oh, triage healing works in FFXIV - has in the past - it just requires healer kits to not be bloated with powerful oGCDs and for encounter designs to have different damage profiles than they've come to have. More like ARR and HW, less like SB/ShB/EW.

And there will never be a case of healers having as many DPS abilities as tanks.

She didn't ask for them to have the same total count of DPS abilities. She asked for them to have the same addition to one's offensive abilities per expansion (which the prior paragraph had just exemplified as not needing to each be on a discrete button, so long as they're still interactive [not just a potency bump trait])-- i.e., if DRK's getting Shadowbringer, maybe WHM should get Afflatus Purgation, or some way for Misery to briefly buff Glare/Holy.

Now, I'm not necessarily sold on their needing to be one-to-one or the like, but for a guy calling foul so often, I would think you'd be more attentive to the difference between a single adder and its sum.

Large collections of the playerbase that are a more representative sample of the player base than here? That sounds pretty smart, actually.

Our couple dozen or less consistent XIV streamers/content creators alone are not a larger sample than the whole of these forums.

[ty_taurus]

Okay, I'm only going to reply with this and not reply to you any more:

I can't have a discussion with someone who is arguing in bad faith.

It's really not in bad faith. Not everyone that disagrees with you is inherently arguing in bad faith. I legitimately cannot comprehend liking the healers as they are for anything other than not having to engage with the system of this game for over half of a fight. It's no exaggeration surreal to think about, like the lyrics in I am the Walrus.

If you're not a raider, then why does it matter when you can just keep playing the way you want to play since it doesn't matter. Many melee players don't use feint, bloodbath, or second wind. Many physical ranged and tanks don't use interject. No one will care if you don't use DPS buttons B, C, and D and just spam A. If you are a raider, than the idea of lifting the skill ceiling should be appealing to you because it allows you to go above what is expected of your role to make the fight easier for the rest of your team. Having a low skill ceiling often means you cannot tighten the gap in your team's performance by skill and can only contribute as much as the floor will allow, which makes fights actually harder, not easier.

The only logical reason that my brain can comprehend to objecting to this is someone who wants to raid, but doesn't want to try harder and likes that their job gets to clear content with half the effort of everyone else. This is not hyperbole. I'm not trying to be insulting. I'm trying to communicate what I understand as logic in this world. This game is inherently structured to ask healing mechanics from you for one short period once per 30-60+ seconds, even in savage where heal requirements are slightly more frequent, healers still will cast Glare/Broil/Malefic/Dosis more than every other action on their hotbar combined. There is no universe in which this is good design. It cannot make sense any more than using your banana phone to order moose juice from a flying sealion named Ginger.

So for that reason I cannot in good conscience believe you because your statement doesn't work logically. As I said before, I can entirely sympathize with not liking the offensive healer design of FFXIV and how much time is dedicated to offensive, but without reworking literally every fight, we can't change that. This is how this game is structured, and it can only stray so far from that formula without breaking. I would love to reduce OGCD heals, put more emphasis on GCD heals, but that will only make a negligible dent in DPS uptime for healers. I think we can totally have a healer who's DPS contributions are disguised as support and create the experience of having a buff-oriented rotation, but that still means having a rotation where you have an order of operations casting on your teammates rather than enemies. And that's doable if handled correctly. But job design that is defined by inactivity is antithetical to FFXIV's combat system in its entirety and has no place in this game and ruins the healer role as it actively fights against the way every encounter is designed.

[Renathras]

She didn't ask for them to have the same total count of DPS abilities. She asked for them to have the same addition to one's offensive abilities per expansion

Which would result, over time, with healer DPS abilities reaching parity with tank ones. Unless you mean to just give healers 2-3 new damage abilities each expansion that are upgrades of existing abilities and don't take up new hotbar slots or rotation space? But...that's what we have already, so I don't think that's what was being asked for.

Our couple dozen or less consistent XIV streamers/content creators alone are not a larger sample than the whole of these forums.

Did I not just reply to this?

Did you see what I said?

Though maybe you replied before the Edit, so I'll post it again:

Also, note I said the COMMENTS, not the CREATORS. Chair also said the same thing I have - to change three healers and leave one braindead. I think that may have been his exact wording, with "probably White Mage". So again, this seems like the logical and best solution.

Specifically here at this timestamp in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbWubxOTUWU&t=376s

...I'm guessing that's the video you're talking about. And I'd also note I basically agree with him overall. A bit less dripping sarcasm and I don't find 1-2-3 NEARLY as exciting as he does, but overall I agree with him. And to this day, I don't see why nAST needed to be removed. Because...there's no reason it needed to be removed. It's not like having ShB d/nAST would break the current game in any way at all. And I say this as a person that really dislikes AST!

Also what he says at 11:48:

"If someone complains that they need to be rewarded with more DPS for their complicated Job, simply tell them that their reward is being able to HAVE FUN and not being BORED out of their ------- minds! Shut the ---- up about a whole 2% dps variance!"

Also rules to live by. Basically, I'm fine with everything he said in that video and agree with the overall position entirely. I'd say it's my own, but it's a bit different - with the return of nAST, that would be FOUR healers with you guys' preferred playstyle to 1 without.

[Renathras]

It's really not in bad faith. Not everyone that disagrees with you is inherently arguing in bad faith.

You're arguing in bad faith while replying saying you're not arguing in bad faith!

WHERE, friend, did I say "everyone that disagrees with me is arguing in bad faith"?

I outright said Roe is NOT arguing in bad faith, and I've not said that Shurrikhan is. You alone I've said that to.

You're arguing in bad faith while trying to rebut the accusation you're arguing in bad faith. XD

.

I will say this to you, though, pretending for a moment you're trying to argue in good faith here:

I legitimately cannot comprehend...

And that is your problem.

You can't comprehend why people who disagree with you are disagreeing with you. Even when they're outright telling you why. So you're making up a reason that is easy for you to defeat - bad faith/a strawman - instead of just...listening.

I get you don't get it. That's the problem. Get it? I've been trying to help you get it, but instead of listening so you might get it, you insist that your wrong position - which is from you not getting it - is the right position. Get it?

...why do I sound like Kakashi...

[ty_taurus]

You're arguing in bad faith while replying saying you're not arguing in bad faith!

WHERE, friend, did I say "everyone that disagrees with me is arguing in bad faith"?

I outright said Roe is NOT arguing in bad faith, and I've not said that Shurrikhan is. You alone I've said that to.

You're arguing in bad faith while trying to rebut the accusation you're arguing in bad faith. XD

.

I will say this to you, though, pretending for a moment you're trying to argue in good faith here:



And that is your problem.

You can't comprehend why people who disagree with you are disagreeing with you. Even when they're outright telling you why. So you're making up a reason that is easy for you to defeat - bad faith/a strawman - instead of just...listening.

I get you don't get it. That's the problem. Get it? I've been trying to help you get it, but instead of listening so you might get it, you insist that your wrong position - which is from you not getting it - is the right position. Get it?

...why do I sound like Kakashi...

It's not in bad faith! I'm trying to communicate genuine feelings to you and you are dismissing them as an attack on your character when this is not the case. Maybe your logic just isn't as sound as you think it is.

The problem is, we don't agree on what "sorry state" is. Many players think the current healing is in a fantastic state.

Can you cite evidence proving or strongly supporting this?

I get you don't get it. That's the problem. Get it? I've been trying to help you get it, but instead of listening so you might get it, you insist that your wrong position - which is from you not getting it - is the right position. Get it?

Would it kill you to at least have an ounce of humility rather than responding to everything with "I get that you don't understand why your WRONG opinion can't compare to the radiance that is my RIGHT opinion." THAT is what actual bad faith argument looks like.

[Renathras]

It's not in bad faith! I'm trying to communicate genuine feelings to you and you are dismissing them as an attack on your character when this is not the case. Maybe your logic just isn't as sound as you think it is.

See?

Well, no, I suppose you don't.

What makes it bad faith is you clearly don't understand a position, and even realize you don't. But instead of TRYING, you insist that the position doesn't exist and is a worse position pretending to be a different position than it is. That is, that NO ONE actually LIKES the current model, they're just lazy slackers/etc that are saying they like it because they don't want to be outted as lazy slackers/etc.

Even when someone tells you that isn't it, you insist that it is.

Now you're insisting that "logic" makes it so because you can't understand it, and to you, that seems to mean that it's not logical. Enjoyment is a subjective thing. There's no logic to why some people like vanilla and others like chocolate. It's not an objective thing if a person enjoys something. If they do, you should ask them why. And when they tell you, you should believe them, not insist that they can't possibly be telling the truth.

Can you cite evidence proving or strongly supporting this?

THIS is also bad faith and snippy. You want me to provide evidence for an opinion? That we don't agree what "sorry state" is?

Or do you want me to provide evidence many players think the current healing is in a fantastic state? (In which case maybe you should only quote that part)

I'd point out, as I already did, that in other venues, you have a lot of discussions about healers and people saying they enjoy healers as they currently exist. Not I used the word "many" (as in, hundreds or thousands) not "most". There's no real way to tell which is the majority position. But if even 20% of people felt this way, that should be sufficient in a game with 4 (5 if we reinstate nAST) healers for 1 to suit them.

Would it kill you to at least have an ounce of humility rather than responding to everything

I don't respond to "everything" with that. In fact, that's the first time I've given that specific response.

And no, that isn't what a bad faith argument looks like - what you've been doing is what a bad faith argument looks like. You're trying to turn the insult around on me now because you were called out.

ALL of my first responses to you WERE with humility. I tried a half dozen times in this threat to explain to you what you're not getting - what you now admit that you don't understand - so that you could get it and could understand it. Each of those times, it was not with some "radiance" of "RIGHT" opinion. Look back through my replies to you in this thread. Look hard at them. I have many times said that some people think this, some think that. That not everyone agrees. That there are differing positions in each camp. I think in my first post in this string of posts I gave something like 6+ different reasons and positions people have on healing in the game right now and what they'd like. It was my original point: That there are a lot of different positions on the matter and not everyone agrees.

I didn't say that no one thinks as you do. I said there are other ways that people think than the way you're insisting they must. It's you insisting they must over and over again in the face of that that has be talking down to you now, because all you had to do, at ANY point in this discussion, is say "Well, yeah, I guess there are other opinions out there."

That's literally it. To simply acknowledge that positions exist other than "want more DPS buttons" or "want to be lazy".

It's you refusing to do that over and over and over again, and doing so in a really bad faith way, that had me post before saying I wasn't planning to respond to you anymore. And I may not here. I thought maybe you were amenable to listening now, but clearly I was mistaken...

.

EDIT: I'm not trying to be discourteous, so I'm just going to stop replying to your posts because there seems to be no other way to get through to you that is still courteous. So...yeah, that's that, I suppose.

[ty_taurus]

THIS is also bad faith and snippy. You want me to provide evidence for an opinion? That we don't agree what "sorry state" is?

Or do you want me to provide evidence many players think the current healing is in a fantastic state? (In which case maybe you should only quote that part)

I just want to point out something very interesting with this response. Earlier, I stated that most players are unbothered by the current healers and would either remain unbothered or respond positively to added damage buttons, and your response was, verbatim "Can you cite evidence proving or strongly supporting this?" I literally copied and pasted it from your earlier response to pose the same question when you said "many players think healers are in a fantastic state."

Both my statement about players being unbothered and yours about players finding healing fantastic are both equally definitive statements, so you essentially just called yourself out for giving a "bad faith and snippy" response. Which is ironic because neither my, nor your responses to those specific statements are bad faith or snippy. It's entirely reasonable and valid to ask for evidence for definitive statements like that. Which is why I followed up with examples of direct response to healers responding positively to the concept of added DPS buttons with the 6.1 trailer example where the healers I've spoken with in my FC who are currently unbothered by WHM specifically and play it regularly were expressing desire to see the PVP WHM limit break integrated into their PVE kits as well as more broadly how wide audiences of gamers respond to game quality or balance/design adjustments through the examples of Pokemon and Super Smash Bros.

Let me try another way of trying to make sense of current healer design...

Healer Structure:

As it stands, all 4 healers share the same structure in gameplay. We agree that this is a flawed idea, because the point of having different jobs is the ability to offer different playstyles for different people. Regardless, this gameplay is defined as:

- Responding to fight mechanics, which every player does (though tanks specifically have additional mechanics to manage that DPS don't and healers don't really. In some harder fights you might respond to certain tankbusters with a cooldown, but you don't deal with the positioning elements or aggro, and in easy fights tanks just do it all themselves without your help)

- Responding to instances of damage every 30-60 seconds or so per fight on average through the use of primarily healing/mitigation cooldowns woven between offensive spells (or if you're WHM, occasionally substituting those DPS spells with a lily heal). These moments will typically last around 1-2 GCDs worth of gameplay time. In Savage, some fights extend this for specific mechanics, but only by another GCD or two.

- If you are a level 90 SCH, you can also respond with Expedient to increase your party's margin for error during tight positional mechanics.
- If you are AST, you manage your card system, which is on paper a more in depth system of constant engagement; however, the general consensus on the card system is that it's mechanically unfun to play and ultimately unrewarding in its current iteration. We can support this claim with the job's abysmal play rate, regularly cited as such by those who have given feedback here and on other media sources.

- Between instances of healing requirements, you spend the remainder of that 30-60 second window attacking with a bare minimum DPS toolkit. The bulk of this gameplay is casting your filler spell. Previous, I made the statement "you use this more than all other actions combined." Well I did some number crunching on P8S part 2, a fight with a very dense amount of healing requirements comparatively to most other content in this game, even other savage fights. I searched out 20 healers in teams that parsed green, 20 that parsed blue, and 20 that parsed purple (and I really dug deep to not just pull in top performing numbers) and these are the average percentages of Glare/Broil/Malefic/Dosis compared to all other actions. This is not percentage of DPS actions used, only the filler spell.
Green Average: 38.39%
Blue Average: 42.77%
Purple Average: 43.38%
I didn't do grey, orange, and pink groups to focus on values that could be considered closer to average on the low and high ends. But as you can see, I was incorrect on stating you use filler spells more than all others in all forms of content. But I would argue that considering I used P8S part 2 to find these values, those numbers will only go up with nearly all other forms of content, and even these numbers are well over 1/3rd of your action usage not including other DPS actions. Some other notes is that, interestingly, the green parse group ASTs were generally the lowest percentages of Malefic usage in contrast to other healers, which makes sense given how much card actions they use, but they were often higher than SCH and SGE in the blue and purple groups, which I think translates to higher skill level ASTs being more comfortable relying on their co-healer's OGCD regens, but that's just a theory. WHM was unanimously the healer that used their filler the most, probably because they have the smallest action total.

Conclusion to Findings:

An important detail to note is that this is almost certainly not reflective of prog given how late into this raid tier we are. That said, something worth mentioning about prog is that DPS doesn't initially matter until your team has reached enrage, and by the time your party reaches enrages and starts needing to push numbers, the majority of the mechanics should feel much smoother, so cautious healing has likely been mitigated by the time you have to start worrying about DPS contribution; however, these numbers may still be smaller early in a raid tier with lower gear and possibly needing an extra heal here and there due to having lower Mind and Determination, but I would guestimate that the number wouldn't be drastically smaller since you'd really only need 1 additional heal at times, and not all the time either.

In other words, at its apex, healers will depend on their filler spell for roughly 40% of their gameplay, and because there's no attributes like combos or additional effects associated with the filler spells, we can describe this 40% of gameplay as largely inactive, or able to be performed with an "auto-pilot" esque approach. This is not to say that you play entirely on auto-pilot, but at times where other jobs must multitask responding to mechanics and maintaining their damage output, healers are except from 40% of this. Again, this is roughly, and based on one of the most healing-intense fights we have well after its initial release. Most content in the game will rise this number quite a bit.

I want to try and translate this value to other games as best I can (which, to be mindful, will not be 1:1 comparisons) and see if you feel that these are genuine improvements to the gameplay experiences of those examples. You may disagree that some of these examples are effectively comparable to FFXIV, which is why I want to give a few different takes to see if we can find one that feels like an adequate comparison.

The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time:

Zelda games can loosely be described as puzzle platformers with a light combat aspect. A major part of Zelda gameplay is collecting new items that allow you to solve puzzles, such as the slingshot, the heavy boots, and bombs. One such tool is the bow and arrow. Let's compile some of the focus you'd spend on choosing inventory items by removing the bow and arrow and its power ups. Instead, you'll gain passive power ups to your sword that cause it to fire a shockwave that homes in on targets that you'd currently use your bow and arrow on. This also replaces the slingshot and boomerang. Instead of augmenting different arrows with fire, ice, or light, all of these effects apply at once and will automatically trigger applicable reactions, such as lighting a torch or freezing water. We can also merge your heavy boots and light boots to just be passive effects to your shoes that allow you to automatically resolve mechanics that require you to change your footwear. So instead of equipping the heavy boots to walk against heavy wind, for example, Link will automatically do this when approaching heavy wind instead. In this example, we've compiled your inventory to resolve more mechanics automatically. It's hard to say if this is effectively translates to 40%, but do you feel that these would make Ocarina of Time a better game?

Persona 5 Royal:

Currently, you can effectively break down Persona 5's turn based combat into choices between offensive actions, healing actions, and support actions (attack/defense/agility buffs and debuffs largely). Rather than have independent actions like Masakukaja, which increases the party's agility, all of Morgana's (the primary healer) healing spells now always boost the target's agility passively. Ryuji who is a bruiser type of character can currently boost the party's attack with Matarukaja, instead all his attacks just also decrease the enemy's defense instead. Effectively, support becomes automatic rather than chosen specifically, and all actions are just about attacking or healing. Every persona can currently carry 8 actions, but we can lower that to 5 actions, and Joker who can hold multiple personas can hold a maximum of 7 instead of 12. Does this improve the general experience of the game?

Tekken:

Tekken is a fighting game where combos can effectively be broken down into a combination of the following actions: Move, Run, Left Punch, Right Punch, Left Kick, and Right Kick. In this example, we will merge both punches and both kicks, simplifying the game's combat into Move, Run, Punch, and Kick. We can also shave down the total move list for each character to reflect this. Additionally, attacks can hit high, mid, or low, where low attacks can be jumped over, but can hit opponents who are guarding while standing up. We'll remove low attacks entirely, taking away the need to focus on whether you need to stand or crouch. Grabs can still break through guard, and every character has at least 2, so there's no issue of guard stalling. It's a fairly simple and easy change to compare to. Does this make Tekken a more fun fighting game?

Fire Emblem:

Fire Emblem is a tactical RPG with a lot of components that go into each encounter: unit count, vision, terrain, weapon triangle, mounted united, doubling enemies... It's a pretty extensive list. In this example, let's remove terrain effects for combat, making it so the player doesn't have to worry about positioning as much. Forests, forts, roads, etc. are all simply cosmetic. Mounted units are more often superior to grounded units due to having higher movement, but specific weapons are designed to counter these units and hit them for extremely high damage. We'll remove the advantages of mounted units as well as weapon advantages against certain types of units so players don't need to focus on what types of units the enemy has other than range and the weapon triangle. These two changes alone would make a major impact on lessening the burden of knowledge on the player, as unit choice and map layout are no longer concerns outside of weapons. There's still the aspects of combat, leveling, stats, and weapons though. Would this improve Fire Emblem's gameplay.

I want to reiterate that we've used a fight with a considerably higher demand for healing than the majority of FFXIV to find this value of 40%. If we wanted to make a more fair comparison to these games for the general experience of FFXIV's content, such as dungeons, fates, the MSQ, alliance raids, etc. This number would shift upward quite noticeably, meaning we'd need to further truncate gameplay aspects of these examples to more accurately compare them to our example of healer gameplay. Let's also be mindful that these are only indirect comparisons and they are not meant to equate the same experience as playing a healer in this game. The point is to try and identify a through-line that can unravel this mysteriously hidden shining quality to that 40% break period.

[Conchoidal]

If you think that the person who's arguing with you isn't doing so in good faith or is just wasting your time, feel free to ignore them instead of derailing the thread.

Anyways, it's not really an inconsistency of feedback that's the problem than the designers apparently hating the idea of making any job more complex than it already is, either to appeal to their new demographic or because of time constraints since the job designers probably have roles in designing, implementing, and testing other content too (although the increased lapse between patches doesn't really reflect an increased quality or amount of content). Maybe we should just keep asking them to bring back or create new abilities which don't require many new assets, since all MCH mains got recently was a basic QoL change and Dismantle and they're incredibly happy over just that.

[Connor]

This argument has gone on since literally like 2.0 with Cleric Stance.

‘If u don’t use cleric ur trash and don’t deserve to play this game’
‘I’m a healer I shouldn’t have to nuke how DARE you’
‘BUT ENCOUNTER DESIGN’
‘But ROLE/ JOB DESIGN’


Repeat for what, 6 years? Except replace Cleric Stance with ‘press healer dps button’ after 4.0.

If you ask me the real problem is that we’re having the exact same arguments we did when the game released. We’re still using the same tired arguments, either Sylphie logic or Raider logic (no dps vs all/some dps).

Isn’t the whole point of a balanced argument to acknowledge the opinions of both sides?

I don’t say this to lay blame on any particular side as well. Of course it’s natural to consistently give an opinion on something you’re passionate about. And unfortunately like every multifaceted argument there’s as much good as bad on any side of it lol

Like yes healers in their current state feel very underwhelming, like you’re barely contributing anything. I don’t dislike playing current healers personally since I’m drawn more towards support play styles, but that doesn’t mean they don’t still need major changes or ways to deal damage on their own.

Likewise, I get that healers are supposed to offer a different playstyle from dps. Which makes sense - otherwise it becomes functionally redundant as a distinct role. At the same time though, encounter design in ffxiv simply does not support a ‘support oriented’ playstyle for healers, necessitating the need for alternative playstyles, which then naturally gravitates towards dps oriented healers.

If nothing else can’t we all at least agree that there’s a gaping contradiction between encounter design and healer job design?

Whether people believe that gap should then be filled with dps rotations, support abilities, more healing, etc, everyone agrees that something needs to be done with the healer role. It feels like so much of this entire (and the healer argument in general) is players trying to ‘defeat’ each other’s arguments instead of accepting a difference of opinion.

The developers are not making their changes based on the arguments of a singular poster. (Unfortunately they seem to be making their changes based on pretty much nothing lol.) No argument anyone ever makes is ever going to single-handedly change the way healers are designed. The mythical ‘Sylphies’ are not destroying the healer role, nor are the evil elite ‘healer raiders’ twisting the role into a dps shaped peg for a healer shaped hole.

The ones to blame here are the developers for their nonsensical job adjustments that seem geared towards a completely different game. Warriors getting a regen added to Shake it Off is pretty good evidence of that. Who needed this? Who asked for it? Healers are already languishing on the heal requirement side of literally every encounter in the game, so the devs make a tank even closer to just flat out replacing them? As far I’m aware Warriors haven’t generally been saying that they desperately needed ways to heal the party lol

[ForsakenRoe]

Repeat for what, 6 years? Except replace Cleric Stance with ‘press healer dps button’ after 4.0.

Specifically this part has activated a part of my brain and made me realise that the real 'compromise' position was actually just SB all along. Cleric Stance (HW and ARR ver) was bad and clunky and restrictive for people who wanted to try and dip into DPSing. SHB and onwards DPSing as a healer is an exercise in tedium. SB had the 'compromise' mid point solution, of reworking Cleric into '5% more damage' coincidentally a 2min CD so it'd fit perfectly in current meta, making DPS skills scale off of Mind instead of Int, and having a more broad spectrum of 'damage skills' to use. The perfect midpoint of 'healers can do damage with a kit roughly similar in size to tank's damage kits at the time (varies depending on class)', versus 'its restrictive to try and dip into throwing some damage during downtime in raid, because Cleric Stance shifting felt unintuitive, clunky, and punished mistimings with 5sec of 'you cannot do your primary role now lmao''.

For example, SCH had 3 DOTs to use in it's rotation (Bio2, Miasma, Shadowflare), and a 4th that could be used as a MP intensive movement alternative to crappy Ruin2. But at no point did it need to use any of those DOTs, outside of Savage. And by Week 8 or so, the gear difference would mean that SCH could still ignore it's DOTs, even IN Savage, because everyone'd be doing a bit more damage to cover that missing DPS. Again, it's a matter of tuning. If Broil V does 300 potency, you could have Biolysis total 350p, Miasma total 320p, Shadowflare total 400p (but it's 15s duration, once every 60s, like SB), and the difference between a 'ignore all the DOTs SCH' and a 'perfect refreshes' SCH would be fairly low in terms of damage output (enough that you could clear up to, I want to say 3rd Savage Fight week 1), but there's still a level of optimization that can be used.

If Energy Drain is enough to 'optimize' around, even in it's 100p state, I think the idea that 'the DOT doesnt do much more damage than the nuke, so people would complain that it's pointless busywork and ask for it's removal' is BS. If it was the SAME damage, yes, but if it's even 30p more total over it's duration, it'd be welcomed as a way to optimize. A good example would be MNK, the difference between TwinSnakes and TrueStrike is only 20p. So theoretically, you could just ignore True, and use Twin on every Raptor Form GCD and automatically keep the damage buff without thinking about it. 'It's only 20p every 3 GCDs, so why not just remove TrueStrike, since it's just busywork to keep the buff up?' You could probably beat enrage of a lot of savage week 1 by ignoring TrueStrike actually, 20p every 5-6 sec adds up to, what, 200p a minute? 2000 over a 10min fight? That's not that much really, equal to 2 Communios. Hell, 7 Glares is more than 2000p, and in prog you're probably missing at least 7 due to safety healing and/or movement for mechanics you don't have committed to muscle memory yet. But TrueStrike remains, because it's something to think about to keep your rotation interesting.

No doubt I'll get naysayed for my example though, because 'bad faith you're comparing a DPS rotation to a healer!' So I'll give another, an old Tank example. WAR in HW used to still have a third combo, Heavy Swing, Skull Sunder, Butchers Block. IIRC the potency values correctly (it's been years), SkullSunder had 10p more than Maim, and BB had 20 more than Path or Eye. Path also only generated 1 Stack of Wrath (now 10 gauge), not 2 (or 20 gauge now), but it applied a 10% damage down to the enemy that could have 100% uptime. So you'd juggle between 'refresh Storm's Eye selfbuff', 'refresh perma-reprisal effect with Path' and 'do max damage with BB combo', but you'd also be keeping an eye out for aggro, as SS and BB had bonus aggro generation effect, and Shirk didn't exist back then. A careful game of chicken, trying to push 30p more per 3 GCDs without accidentally stealing aggro when you're not meant to have the boss. An opportunity to 'optimize' that no casual player had to bother with if they didn't want to, you could week1 clear Savage with just 'use Eye for buff, then path for selfheal/apply damagedown debuff to enemy'. So I really don't see why the idea that 'if it isnt much of a gain, people will want it removed' is a thing. Fracture was a DPS loss in most situations, only being used by WARs in situations like 'your last GCD of Berserk, and your next 123 combo hit is Heavy Swing, and you don't have a Fell Cleave left, and it's not going to leave your TP bar in shambles later in the fight'. Ignoreable by most people (you could get a 95%+ without even bothering with it), but still a cool thing for people who wanted to optimize it.

Hell, I knew a guy who played MNK in SB, who refused to learn the 4.3 TK rotation for the longest time. He got 95% or above with the 'standard' rotation pretty often. TK wasn't 'needed' to clear the fights, it wasn't 'needed' to parse well. But it was a very different and interesting way to play the same class, for people who wanted to mess with it, and I think that was cool.