Quote Originally Posted by Renathras View Post
What I don't understand is the compelling reason that ALL the healers need to be 2m deep. Some of us are only 1.5m tall. Some people are only 0.6m tall. What about those people?
I'm not asking for them all to be 2m deep, I'm asking for them to all be swimming pools with ranging depths from 'kiddie pool' to '2m deep for able swimmers', and the players can choose how far towards the deep end they want to go. But your solution is to have 3 'proper swimming pool' healers, and one 'inflatable pool in the back yard' healer with WHM. All that's going to do is cause the players who perceive themselves to be more 'hardcore' to ostracize any and all who play the 'healer for dummies', as was the case with WHM in SB. 'Why play WHM when AST heal same but better damage contribution?'

Reason why someone might want to play a healer that has 3 DOTs to juggle instead of one 30s one as we have now might be, and stay with me on this cos it's gonna be a shocker, they like to be engaged while playing the game. Guess I'll take a turn at coming up with stupid extremes to illustrate a point. Imagine if, instead of SMN doing the primal skills like Ruby Rite or Slipstream or whatever, all that potency was baked into the 'summon demi-X' spell. All 4 MountainBusters and Topaz Thingys are all compiled into Titan summon, so SMN's rotation becomes 'summon Demi, afk for 20s, summon next'. It'd be the same damage output, but so so much more boring to play. Same goes for any class. Some people enjoy pressing 5 buttons to get the same output as a different class that only has to press 2. Some people enjoy the OGCD bombsite of DRK's 2min window, or GNB's Continuationfest, compared to WAR. But we don't need to hold all our resources on DRK, or keep our No Mercy and Gnashing Fang aligned on GNB, when our 'endgame content' is Troia. Because there, it does not matter what we press, or how suboptimally we play, as long as we don't wipe (and wiping is kinda difficult now, really). Besides, look how many people advocate keeping Energy Drain around, even though it's potency has been hobbled over and over. And when I've asked them in the past how low they'd accept it going, some have said 'if it still has potency, I want it kept'. Even ONE potency, because even at one single potency point, it offers that player a form of complexity to play around, a way to express their skill, even if it's completely outshone by crit variance.

I reckon I could clear P8S now as AST without playing a single card, due to gearing and having more ILVL than week 1. Does this mean we should delete cards entirely, because they're only something to worry about optimizing during the first few weeks of prog?

And eh, Cata, the expansion where they jacked healing throughput requirements through the roof, causing a mass exodus of healer mains from the role as they could not keep up with the sudden extra HPS requirements, having grown accustomed to the ez-breezy ride through Wrath Heroics a few months before? Where have I heard that situation unfolding recently...? But yeh, this once again is another data point to my theory: people got the idea of 'healers only heal' from some specific point, and haven't let go since. I assumed Cata or Mists, and this correlates. But there's evidence in earlier-WOW that healers were intended to do damage (wanding is manacost-free, Judgement of Wisdom, Druid Clearcasting triggering off of melee in Vanilla, Loatheb in Naxx as a bossfight), and retail is... retail, M+ and all that. So it's just this one, 2-4 year window of time, in one MMO (admittedly the biggest one on the market) that I guess everyone is accepting as 'the gold standard for Healer role design', despite A: the majority of this playerbase being allergic to anything even tangentially related to WOW, and B: WOW itself having moved past that design. Or is that why people want to have 'healers only heal', because WOW does expect some DPS from healers (and the players are vocal enough to tell you, with plenty of venom in their tone), so we must have FFXIV healers 'only heal' because WOW bad?

If the healers healed in different ways to each other, ie: Druid's HOT focus, Paladin's melee based builder/spender focus (which would actually have zero obstacles to implementation, now that every boss's arse takes up 75% of the arena), Disc's Disc-ing, then maybe the damage kit homogenization would be a tiny bit more palatable. Tiny bit. But even the healing side is horrendously homogenized, because I guess if Hypothetical Healer can't look at their kit and recognize 'ah this SGE skill, Prognosis, it like Medica, me spam' they just bluescreen and let the party die?