The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[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.