Quote Originally Posted by Deusteele View Post
Reduce the availability of oGCD's and weaken the power of GCD heals. Increase the rate and potency of Raid-Wide damage from bosses. Make players use their full healing kit regularly.

Remove the focused healing role completely and turn it into a support role based around Haste/Brave/Faith/Shell/Protect/Regen. Provide a full dps rotation to be used while buffs are ticking on players.

Neither option is going to be happy with the decision, but Yoshida put himself on the spot when he catered to Savage players and the spreadsheet playstyle.
I believe/hope we can look at Abyssos as evidence that 'add more to heal', 'reduce access to healing OGCDs', 'force players to GCD heal more' and any adjacent 'solutions' along that path, are NOT the way to go. If they keep Abyssos level healing requirements, but reduce our access to OGCDs, it'll go from 'bloody hell this is annoying to keep up with' to potentially 'this is not even clearable'. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for an occasional 'throw out some GCD heals', I did my J-Waves and Curtain Calls, but there's problems with the idea. First, GCD healing has a BIG MP cost, it's not feasible to expect a WHM's MP bar to keep up when their AOE heals are so expensive, and lily healing only goes so far when they come back every 20s. MP management would be a nice thing to bring back, but not with how restrictive current MP costs are, and forcing players to 'lmao meld 900 more piety just to keep up with this new design' is not gonna go down well.

Second, more GCD healing means we don't have as much time to do damage, 'no shit thats the point' I hear you say, but I think it might lead to even higher damage variances, and therefore cause even more issues for enrage tuning. If you tune for a healer to be expected to do 4k damage over the 8min fight, as we have now, then reduce the amount they need to do to be 2k because they need to heal more, what happens when you have too much to heal, and they can only manage 1.5k because they have less tools for healing (WHM vs AST for example)? What if it turns out 'we had to keep more tools on the barrier healers than the pures, so they can still mit', and SCH SGE becomes the defacto pair because it's able to play like current, OGCD healing focused? What if players play better than dev testing teams expect (wouldn't be the first time), easily keep up with the new healing required and put out 3k instead of 2k, completely demolishing the enrage and having way less trouble than anticipated, leading to a very flat and disappointing raid?

Third, if we change how much time in a fight is spent healing vs DPSing, that might potentially mess with how older content works. Yeh I know EW stat squish did a number on most stuff, but it still needs to be a consideration for stuff. For example, you make more healing GCDs required in all Post-EW-Launch content. Now the DPS check in DSR might be unclearable. Can you do the eye phase DPS check, when your healers now have to spend a GCD extra per damage instance to keep up? If not, the fight also has to be retuned to the new design, meaning more dev time. It's like PLD getting retuned for the 2min meta, it wouldn't have needed that retuning if they didn't do the 2min design in the first place. That's a different topic though

I've been advocating for a 'add more complexity to DPS side' stance because it doesn't affect anything else. More rotational complexity during DPStime doesn't affect how hard it is to heal through Natural Alignment. It doesn't change how I'd tackle the Mit plan for Dominions. It can be balanced via potency tuning to be roughly equal to current damage output of healers. My WHM idea is about 80potency per minute higher than current. That same idea, while only refreshing Dia and spamming Glare (same as current, but Dia refreshing is more often in my idea) is 100 potency per minute less than current WHM. It's completely possible to tune the damage of the rotation to be such that playing 'glarespam' is enough to clear content, and doing the full bells-and-whistles rotation is just optimization for those dirty barsebrains/only a necessity for Savage and Ultimates. Or in my idea's case, it has alternative benefits, like charging a gauge to access a healing tool faster. You'd get there with just Glare and Dia, but throwing out that new Banish spell on CD would get you 5 gauge instead of the 1 from another Glare, and it's 40 potency stronger, might as well use it right?

Like right now, noone's gonna care if you're spamming Glare in a dungeon boss, and not using Dia at all, because it doesn't matter. Dia is just over two Glares of damage, so actually maintaining Dia is a mere 2 Glares a minute gained. When you look at it that way, you realise pretty quick: what you damage skills you press outside of Savage doesn't matter one jot. In anything without an enrage timer, 'what damage buttons you press' could even be 'literally nothing lmao', and you can still clear. I have never understood the players who say 'I dont want to have more damage skills to press for X Y or Z reasons' because those reasons can often be torn down like paper in the rain.

-'Hotbar space' condense GCD heals like Cure1 into Cure2, Medica1 into Medica2 etc.
-'But the new players' We're level 90, what new players? Keep the healing accessible sure, but adding more damage tools (that can be ignored if the precious 'new healer' can't keep up) isn't gonna kill the role
-'I like current healer design' Cool, good thing the balancing (if I had my way) means you could keep playing that design, at 98.5% of it's current effectiveness!

Quote Originally Posted by Semirhage View Post
Haste! Bravery! Protect! Shell! Cure Cure Cure! Repeat! becomes pretty brainless really quickly.
Another reason why I think 'make us heal more often' is not the way to go: If we swap from pressing Glare a lot to pressing Cure a lot, isn't it the same problem? Of course someone's probably gonna say 'then why do you want more damage button if damage button is all just 'do damage' and to that I say 'context', yes a theoretical 15s CD Banish spell is just like Glare in that they do damage, but there's context around that button. In my idea, it builds gauge for a powerful heal tool at 500% the rate of Glare, so you can get the tool more often by using Banish on CD. It's timer is staggered from Dia, but may overlap in 'refresh timing' with Dia, leading to choices needing to be made of which to use first. Since losing a cast of Banish would be 40 potency, you could theoretically hold onto it to use for movement, if you so wished. Contrast this with WHM's healing tools, Solace is Cure2 and Rapture is Medica. But why would I ever want to use Medica or Cure2, when I have lilies that are damage neutral? Those GCDs become an absolutely 'I am out of everything else' last resort, which is fine as a safety net, but the point is, they're identical to the lily spells in function, there's no nuance to them. Maybe if there's super rough constant AOE healing to be done, it might be an idea to use one lily to get the timer charging, then MP healing, then swap back to lily healing, to keep both resources balanced and not overcapping, but we also have the Lilybell so...

Having a healer that is based on keeping up buffs on people would be good though IMO, just to satisfy the 'I don't want to do damage!' healers. They don't have to damage, they can just keep rotating Bravery and Faith on people for their rotation instead of Glare on the enemy. Or would 'buffing ally's damage' be too close to 'deals damage' too?