I'm bored when I heal because I need more complex DPS rotations

[Renathras]

...

It's extremely technically[/u] correct that in [u]one[/o] very specific high end encounter with one very specific party composition with one very specific strategy executed by one very skilled group of people, healers weren't a requirement. Don't oversell it. Even restricting our view to Ultimates with people trying to clear without Healers, has anyone cleared Dragonsong yet with 0 Healers? One group managed it using just 1 Healer, but the most overpowered one in current content and, again, a very specific party composition, strategy, and skilled team. Has P12P2 been cleared with no Healers yet? Which Pandemonum Savage fights (1-12) have all been cleared without Healers? While you could argue any is too much, I don't think it's the prevalent thing you bill it as.

People are hanging their hat HARD on that 0 Healer TOP clear, seemingly willfully oblivious to any other fights in the game or even the very specific things that went into that one clear and the fact no one (unless this has changed?) has replicated the feat yet.

It's like saying technically fights can be cleared without Tanks - people cleared Ex6 without one, and it's probably possible to clear other encounters without Tanks...but that doesn't make it practical or indicate Tanks should be removed from the game. Some fights have been cleared without DPS, like the all Tank runs. No one's pointing to that to indicate that "DPS aren't needed to clear the hardest fights in the game".

I appreciate the sentiment, but pull it back some. There's a legitimate argument to be made that doesn't require the hyperbole.

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One thing interesting to me about that quote - they admit they've reduced healing requirements. Which means healing requirements could be scaled back up. And while people say "Doing that means casual players won't be able to clear hard content", the same rings true for DPS rotations. But the more important key is that it means they wouldn't have to "remake all prior content" since prior content seems to follow that same design and is in the game with that level of healing requirement already (just it's not noticed because of how powerful syncing is.

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In any case, the point still stands that most people are talking about feelings. Reference an extremely "technically correct, the best kind of correct" fact doesn't alter the reality that the majority and crux of the arguments are not factual based, but subjective positions based on perceptions of those facts.

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As for the dismissing arguments:

I've played since 2.3. Always mained Healer (mostly WHM, sometime SCH, most of the time dual maining them both). I've done Savages (at level), Extremes (at level since SB), PvP, PvE, Solo stuff like PotD, the MSQ I always run as Healers, dungeons of course, and Exploration Content, and I have every WHM and SCH Relic i nthe game.

My arguments here are routinely dismissed by people as me not "having more experience". So I'm not sure how that metric works. Moreover, I far more often see the arguments being dismissed as those of people who don't consistently run savage (with childish arguments), not those who do.

I agree everyone should be listened to, but that also means solutions must incorporate feedback from both/all camps, not just the hardcore raiding community.

I'm not sure BLM is "such a well designed Job". It gets that accolade a lot from high end players while everyone else...avoids it like the plague.

[Silver-Strider]

One thing interesting to me about that quote - they admit they've reduced healing requirements. Which means healing requirements could be scaled back up. And while people say "Doing that means casual players won't be able to clear hard content", the same rings true for DPS rotations.

Except it isn't true for DPS rotations at all.
The 1 button design has actually made it harder for casuals to clear harder content because of how much of an emphasis fight design has put on that single button.
You are expected to keep that button pressed as often as possible in order to clear content that every missed opportunity to do so is that much further away your group gets to clearing. When the emphasis was on DoTs before, you weren't missing as much damage delaying a DoT reapply as you currently are missing a Filler cast. You're comparing a 250+ potency nuke spell to a DoT that, other than WHM, had little to no upfront potency, with the highest example being Misama 2 at 100 upfront potency which isn't even half of Broils current potency.

So, let's compare. Say I need to heal 5 times with GCD currently.
That's 1475 total potency I'm missing from Broil casts.
Even if I delayed the DoTs from Shadowflare (50 potency per tick), Miasma 1 (20 upfront+ 20 per tick) Miasma 2 (100 upfront and 25 per tick) and Bio (40 per tick) every single time I had to heal, I only miss out on 665 total potency, which is including every tick of damage I miss out on from not having the DoTs up immediately (assuming I recast them in that exact order), so not even half of the potency lost from the current Broil. The only time that would ever pull ahead of the Broils is if I consistently allowed my DoTs to fall off throughout the fight, which if we're being honestly would be the equivalent of failing to cast broil as often as possile.

You are currently punished much more severely for healing with your GCDs than you ever were at any point from ARR-SB, that increasing the Healing requirements would just make it that much more difficult to clear content for casuals because they'd have less time to contribute to their filler.

[Renathras]

Except it isn't true for DPS rotations at all.
The 1 button design has actually made it harder for casuals to clear harder content because of how much of an emphasis fight design has put on that single button.

I don't think this is correct.

If you mean "getting a 99", then sure, you'd be right. A single missed GCD kills your chances of getting that. But casuals aren't getting that anyway. Moreover, damage requirements have been shifted away from Healers. Recall in HW, Healers had a bigger damage contribution than Tanks did. And that was when "content was designed for 0 healer dps" (probably not true, but so was the official line). As many people's clears have shown, plenty of GCDs can be missed or replaced with GCD healing by the Healer(s) and still beat the Enrage.

You're talking about perfect optimization, not clears - and perfect optimization was harder before anyway.

Yes, mathematically you can make arguments like that, but the Enrages aren't designed around it, so it's not relevant. The "punishment" is considerably less severe. Honestly, the bigger offender there is the 2 min meta/burst windows, anyway.

And I don't think you realize how much casuals have issues with DoT uptime and maintenance. Playing in PF the last couple weeks, I've seen a lot of Healers that will let DoTs drop for...well, the entire duration of one of mine. Back when more of our damage was packed in DoTs, they'd have seen a far larger drop in their DPS by doing so than they do now.

The idea DoTs are better for casuals assumes something it shouldn't; that casuals maintain high DoT uptime. I don't know why everyone likes to work off this assumption, but it's a bad assumption. Go into an 24 man and watch how much time one or more of the Healers just...don't have their DoTs on bosses. You might be shocked. While some keep good uptime...a lot do not.

Also, for your analysis: Was the total overall potency of the ARR potencies listed equal to SCH's current potency per minute?

That is, currently, we have:

EW: 2x Biolyses (700 + 700 = 1,400) and ([60 / 2.5] - 2) = 22x Broils (295 * 22 = 6,490) for a total of 7,890 potency per minute.

Losing a Broil is 295 / 7,890 * 100% = ~3.74%
Losing 5 Broils is 1,475 / 7,890 * 100% = ~18.7%
[Not factoring in buff windows, of course, for simplicity.]

What was ARR? And you have to remember to compare Cleric Stance boosted ones to non-Cleric ones (assume for the sake of argument a super casual never using Cleric) and you're probably going to see a very large gap appear very quickly.

And then...you have to realize that Healer damage "didn't matter" (again, the official line) in ARR/HW, so being "punished" wasn't exactly part of the equation.

EDIT:

Ruin was an outlier, though as it was balanced out on SMN by the fact that your pet would attack and make up the other half of your potency. And that was also fine for SCH since they had 6 DoTs during ARR (7 during AoE plus Bane) until cross class Thunder was replaced with Blizzard II.

It's so weird to me that people make such a big deal out of Cross-Class Thunder when it was replaced in 2.1. It existed for only like 3 months, yet people talk about it like it was iconic to SMN/SCH and was the majority of ARR.

Agree with the rest of your post, but people have brought that up as a serious point to discussions somewhat frequently and it's kind of silly to use something that existed for all of one patch in the game's history as if it was somehow a norm.

To put that into perspective, the Aesthatician, PvP, Housing, and Extremes (and Moogle Mog) were all added to the game in 2.1. That's also when Thunder was made THM/BLM exclusive. Meaning that Cross-Class Thunder wasn't even used in a single Extreme fight, since it was removed before the first Extreme was added to the game. And though I didn't remember this, apparently, Bane had a maximum of 3 targets:

"Bane
Now correctly states that Bio, Bio II, and Masma are spread to a maximum of three targets. "

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...7af43f3c43828a

[WaxSw]

Ultimates

I think I've told you, several times in fact, that the problem is not that "Just one group did it" but the fact that the 0-1 healer clears happens on EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF CONTENT regardless of difficulty (in fact what you say its not even true, Ast saw the first solo heal of DSR for example but other healers have achieved that). You can say EX6 can be cleared without 1 tank which ok but there is a huge difference between more trivial content and consistently clearing the hardest content with half or no presence of a role, which is what happens to healers (there are no 0 tanks clears of TOP for example and there wont be anytime soon as well as no solo tank clears of DSR). The all tank runs happen on outdated content so that's why no one complaints and when it happens on content (like P1s) there is an uproar, let alone how there is not a single "hardest fight" that has been cleared without dps not just on content but on the same expansion it was released.

At this point there is no denying that healers have become more and more irrelevant to the point that (admitted by those who made the DSR solo clear) the hardest part of executing a solo healer run is the randomized target that happens if a mechanic targets 2 healers.

One thing interesting to me about that quote - they admit they've reduced healing requirements. Which means healing requirements could be scaled back up. And while people say "Doing that means casual players won't be able to clear hard content", the same rings true for DPS rotations. But the more important key is that it means they wouldn't have to "remake all prior content" since prior content seems to follow that same design and is in the game with that level of healing requirement already (just it's not noticed because of how powerful syncing is.

Source? Because in the interview I posted they don't say that. Its not as simple as moving a slider and a fight goes from needing 8k hps to 12k hps, content would have to be rebalanced due to the rate healers get skills and the interactions with the dps requirements, let alone how the mechanics of both bosses and healers simply don't work well with a high healing enviroment due to how separated in time they are and the lack of meaningful resource management and healing interactions.

I've played since 2.3. Always mained Healer (mostly WHM, sometime SCH, most of the time dual maining them both). I've done Savages (at level), Extremes (at level since SB), PvP, PvE, Solo stuff like PotD, the MSQ I always run as Healers, dungeons of course, and Exploration Content, and I have every WHM and SCH Relic i nthe game.

My arguments here are routinely dismissed by people as me not "having more experience". So I'm not sure how that metric works. Moreover, I far more often see the arguments being dismissed as those of people who don't consistently run savage (with childish arguments), not those who do.

Honestly, outside of savage there is nothing that may challenge a healer a bit so anything below that is not taken into consideration and when you seem to not know the real definition of slidecasting, there are no records of you doing well in any hard content in the log page, you seem confused with the oportunity costs of skills (like the discussion we had about how a dps neutral toxicon would kill any semblance of skill expression in sage gameplay) and you downplay some of the direst state of the jobs when looked at optimization like it was 5.0 Sch and probably many more examples I'm missing...

There are reasons why people say you may lack experience.

There is a big difference, however, between "you lack experience" and "the role is not for you"

[Renathras]

1 Healer clears happening and 0 Healer clears happening RARELY when encounters VERY SPECIFICALLY allow it through MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF CHEESING MECHANICS by VERY HIGH SKILLED GROUPS isn't something I see as a massive problem. Ultimates, in particular, are extremely scripted and designed around the (weird) idea that people should just take no damage, as mistakes result in damage (and proper play little to none), which is just bad design in general. That has nothing to do with Healer kits, btw, but encounter design. The idea that encounters can't have periodic or consistent but low amounts of damage is absurd. Every Healer Job in the game has some kind of Medica 1 equivalent, just give them a reason to cast it.

In MMOs past, when people found clever ways to skip mechanics or reduce/eliminate the need of classes or roles, it wasn't looked on as an indictment of the game, even if it happened multiple times. It was looked at as very skilled players able to express their skill by breaking what most people either couldn't do or wouldn't bother trying. that's why the volume of it happening is important and why "it happening at all" isn't the crisis.

4 mans not needing Healers is far more of an issue, since that IS more common run content and doesn't require highly skilled players to pull off cheesing mechanics - it merely requires having a WAR Tank.

They also don't need to alter old content: Again, every Healer Job in the game has a Medica 1. Yes, people would have to GCD heal. Healing SHOULD be GCD based, not oGCD based. That's part of the reason it's so "boring" and there's so much "Gloilafiosis spam" - because Healers have lots of empty GCDs to fill with damage spells when they aren't NEEDING to use those GCDs on healing instead.

Honestly, nothing above Extreme matters since the bulk of the playerbase doesn't engage with it. See? It's easy to hand-wave away everything in the game that makes your argument problematic. Doesn't mean it's valid to do so.

I don't play Savages for a simple reason: I don't like PF them and I have a variable schedule that doesn't allow for set group times for a static. It's that simple. And I did know what slidecasting is (I've been using it for 3+ expansions now!), people who want to discredit a person so they don't have to deal with their arguments (ad hominem fallacy) just enjoy ignoring the parts of what people say that doesn't suit their narrative and using whatever they can, even if it means ripping out context and removing parts of conversations that clarify or specify a position, so they can keep doing so. And a lot of things are also subjective (like what does and doesn't count as "skill expression".)

You might also note that I tend not to tell people roles are or are not for them. I DO note when people seem to be advocating for something outside of the role, however - like when people insist we can't be required to use more GCD heals because that cuts into their damage uptime, or when all their solutions are to fix damage rotations.

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I've presented one argument that you can't handwave away, and to date, no one's actually countered it. More than one, but one in particular: That adding more DPS buttons doesn't fix the problem, it just papers over it by making people "less bored" (some people).

The underlying problem is that Tanks in particular, and DPS on the side, have far too much healing and mitigation, in an encounter design paradigm that emphasizes mitigation over healing, and that encounters themselves do not have enough outgoing damage.

The general response I get is "they can't redesign EVERY. FIGHT. IN. THE. GAME!", ignoring the fact that they haven't redesigned "EVERY. FIGHT. IN. THE. GAME!" when they did things like removed Healer damage kits, give Tanks more healing, and so on, and that Healer kits are bloated with healing - something we all agree on, btw - that they don't need because encounters don't call for it.

The other counter is "Jimmy Casual won't be able to clear!", ignoring that these same people are insisting that Jimmy Casual shouldn't be clearing hard content anyway, and when we're talking about Ultimates and Savages, it shouldn't matter; people should be able to use their healing buttons competently at that level. And for those saying they're bored even in 4 mans and 4 mans would have to play like Savages so THEY won't be bored - I'm sorry, that's just an inane argument, as they're never going to be engaging. If you find Spamming 3-4 attacks engaging (most AOE "rotations" in the game in general), that isn't far from spamming 1-2. MSQ stuff's always going to be easy and everyone just deals with it. WARs popping Bloodwhetting and then doing their 1-2 AOE rotation isn't that "engaging", either.

And think about it:

If people aren't taking Healer Jobs TO CONTENT because they don't need THE HEALING - why are they going to take you to content that doesn't need THE HEALING just because you have a few more DPS buttons and are less bored?

NO ONE has answered this question yet. I think because the answer is "It doesn't fix the problem".

It's why I started that thread about what changes WOULD prevent a 0 Healer Ultimate clear.

SCH having 3 DoTs and Fester would not have stopped a 0 Healer TOP clear, now would it? And we all know it. So I don't understand why none of you seem to want to admit it, unless you just want more damage buttons/to be a DPS-lite and don't actually care about the problem. But even I don't think that's true. ("Then why'd you mention it?!" because I can't understand why you guys won't agree with me on how your solution doesn't actually address the problem!)

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Point is, the big problem is encounter design.

The more sober minded people here, like Roe, have even made this argument. Hell, I think even the non-sober minded ones like Semi have.

My issue is that more DPS buttons doesn't fix THAT. We have the same problem, and people bored with 2 button spam are going to get bored with 4 button spam with time after the novelty wears off. It's not a futureproofed solution.

The game needs a combat system redesign, and it's not even changing "EVERY. FIGHT. IN. THE. GAME!", since most fights before ShB ALREADY have the right system. Go back and do the 4 man Ala Mhigo dungeon, for example. It's ridiculous that a level 70 dungeon has greater healing requirements than a level 90 one does, despite us having far more tools at level 90 to deal with damage.

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And it boggles my mind how, instead of admitting "Yeah, Ren's got a point, that IS pretty stupid and problematic", people would rather attack me than attack the actual problem.

I'm not your enemy, believe it or not.

I'm worried about the same problems you guys are.

I'm just ALSO worried your "fix" isn't a lasting solution, in addition to it further watering down the Trinity system.

Again: Healers having more DPS buttons - how does that prevent 1T/3D dungeon runs? How does that prevent 0 Healer Ultimate clears?

What's that? It just makes you less bored in content, but it won't matter since you won't be taken to the content in the first place? It doesn't prevent 0 Healer Ultimate clears or 1T/3D 4 man runs?

Yes, I know it doesn't...so how can it be a solution - or THE solution - to the problem when it doesn't actually address the problem?

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The irony about DPS being mandatory, btw, is that MMOs introduced Enrages SPECIFICALLY because otherwise, you could just make a party of all Tanks and Healers and clear any content. They had to enact Enrages (or MP negative Healers at a high enough rate even Healer redundancy wouldn't work) to make DPS relevant.

And now we're at the other end of things where they've made Healers and in some content Tanks irrelevant by forgetting that Healing checks should exist and that in a game with infinite Raises, you can have a squishy eat a tankbuster from time to time, like the 1 Healer 0 Tank clear of RubiEx.

[ForsakenRoe]

I CBA going to look at waybackmachine atm (raiding) but the fact that Biolysis ticks are listed at 70 and Ruin 1 was 90 in ARR is pretty funny

[ty_taurus]

I CBA going to look at waybackmachine atm (raiding) but the fact that Biolysis ticks are listed at 70 and Ruin 1 was 90 in ARR is pretty funny

Ruin was an outlier, though as it was balanced out on SMN by the fact that your pet would attack and make up the other half of your potency. And that was also fine for SCH since they had 6 DoTs during ARR (7 during AoE plus Bane) until cross class Thunder was replaced with Blizzard II.

[ForsakenRoe]

https://youtu.be/D_gyLIjxKMs?t=244

Let me drop this here because it's relevant (probably language warning, it's WOW players)

Jdotb (very competent healer main) brings up the point of 'people started doing zero healer runs of M+' and how it's really screwy that it was possible to do that, and everyone tried to go 'yeh but it's not that big a deal right, it's just 2 runs in the top 100' to downplay it and such. And like some of us here, Jdotb says what we say: the problem is more than just 'only a small amount of these kind of runs occurred', more than 'how frequent this kind of gameplay came about and was successful'. The problem is that it happened at all. The fact that, in some of the most challenging content in the game, you can reduce (or in the case of TOP/these M+ keys, completely remove) an entire facet of the 'holy trinity', because offhealing/mit/utility from other classes has been powercrept for whatever reason, whether that be 'increase self-agency of tanks over their own HP' or 'reduce stress on healer' whatever, it hit a tipping point in both games. Blizzard has tried to address their issue by increasing incoming damage and player HP by 25% (not touching healing, effectively cutting healing power by 25%). SE has done nothing so far. I will be interested to see if Blizzard's 'fix' has long term lasting power, because they did the same for DF launch and this fix happened only one patch later, they might have to keep doing the 'fix' over and over every patch to counteract the gear level players get to

edit: random Jdotb video, damn that's a lot of wrath (glare), starfire (banish), moonfire (dia) and sunfire (...aero 3 but light themed?) casts for a healer huh, gee druid how come blizzard lets you have two DOTs (that's not getting into the fact cat form allows you to use another two DOTs potentially)

[ty_taurus]

It also stems from the fact that dissatisfaction with glare spam was directly responded to by Yoshi-P with the response that if you want to spend more time healing, you should play Ultimate. Disregarding how tone deaf that response is to the problem of not having enough things to do in most content, the very content he claimed was designed to let healers heal more so they'd have to Glare less has so little outgoing damage that it can be managed entirely by non-healer sustain. Even the poor taste solution to the problem that has been brought up ad nauseum for the last 4 years doesn't actually solve the problem.

It's like if you have a house fire, and when you call the fire department they respond with "Well, there's a river 2 miles from you." and when you go to the river to get water, the river is dry.

[ForsakenRoe]

It's like if you have a house fire, and when you call the fire department they respond with "Well, there's a river 2 miles from you." and when you go to the river to get water, the river is dry.

And upon making this complaint to the fire department (from a payphone, since your house has now burned down), they respond 'well, have you considered that living in a house might just not be 'for you', you know? Have you considered trying living in a tent in the woods instead'