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

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

[...]More dps is the wrong solution because that's not the point of rolling healer, those buttons should just be there to have something to do while no healing is needed to throw in once and a while, so in order to fix it is for there to require more healing done, which is never gonna happen this expansion anyway because the devs are to afraid to do anything like that mid expansion.

Lmao "giving us more to heal".

I don't think veteran healer will refuse that entirely, maybe? If that happens however, I can already see more people throwing hissy fit in dungeons against healers because the random sylphie healer can no longer heal with Freecure/Physick/Medica II/Cure II spam without the help of current tank's self sustenance.

What about vet healers? The moment we healed what's needed, back to 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 we go again. Yaaaay how stimulating.

[ty_taurus]

He ain't wrong though, you want more complex dps rotaion, play a dps then.

Thing they should do instead is remove all tank self healing, which is never gonna happen because tanks will all throw a hissyfit over this, but they made a huge mistake giving them way to much self healing, so that the player that actually has to heal .... only has to do so when there's raidwide aoe's, when the one person who is taking the most damage and should be healed by you never needs it, never understood that design logic honestly.
Or make it so that their self healing is reduced by 90% when inside a dungeon/raid zone, so they can still have it everywhere else; I dunno, but it needs to go if you want healers to be mor engaging to play.

More dps is the wrong solution because that's not the point of rolling healer, those buttons should just be there to have something to do while no healing is needed to throw in once and a while, so in order to fix it is for there to require more healing done, which is never gonna happen this expansion anyway because the devs are to afraid to do anything like that mid expansion.

Which of the following do you honestly think makes more sense from a design standpoint:

1. Rework the 4 healers to have fun and meaningful gameplay in all forms of content from solo instances in the MSQ all the way up to ultimate level content.

OR

2. Redesign every single solo instance, FATE, and encounter that has been created since ARR was released 10 years ago to provide enough damage to make healers spend more time using their healing resources than their DPS ones.

How about you tell me how you'd allocate the time and resources to accomplish that objective. Go on, I'll wait.

[IDontPetLalas]

He ain't wrong though, you want more complex dps rotaion, play a dps then.

Thing they should do instead is remove all tank self healing, which is never gonna happen because tanks will all throw a hissyfit over this, but they made a huge mistake giving them way to much self healing, so that the player that actually has to heal .... only has to do so when there's raidwide aoe's, when the one person who is taking the most damage and should be healed by you never needs it, never understood that design logic honestly.
Or make it so that their self healing is reduced by 90% when inside a dungeon/raid zone, so they can still have it everywhere else; I dunno, but it needs to go if you want healers to be mor engaging to play.

More dps is the wrong solution because that's not the point of rolling healer, those buttons should just be there to have something to do while no healing is needed to throw in once and a while, so in order to fix it is for there to require more healing done, which is never gonna happen this expansion anyway because the devs are to afraid to do anything like that mid expansion.

I would dispute this, there is no other game that I have played in which healers are reduced to hitting 2 DPS buttons so frequently while being able to keep a group healed when necessary. Secondly, healers do not only do group content , so in solo content , more DPS options typically ARE the best options .

I don't disagree with having tank solo healing adjusted according to dungeon content difficulty however I doubt that they would be able to /willing to invest into that. Also as you point out they would be too afraid of having tanks really not like that for a number of reasons.

[Beddict]

He ain't wrong though, you want more complex dps rotaion, play a dps then.

I need you to explain something then: why are Tanks allowed to have a DPS rotation? By your logic, Tanks don't need it at all since they aren't DPS, they're Tanks. The responsibility of the Tank is to hold aggro, position the boss properly so DPS can get uptime, and mitigate damage taken through defensive cooldowns. That's it, that is all a Tank needs to do, and yet you've got PLD with their Physical and Magic phases, WAR spamming Fell Cleave and Inner Chaos, DRK vomitting oGCDs everywhere, and GNB with their Gnashing Fang/Continuation combo and more. Since none of that actually contributes to the Tank Role, then wouldn't it be in SE's best interest to remove all those abilities and simplify Tanks to the four required offensive actions?

1. Single Target Spam
2. AoE Spam
3. DoT
4. Range Attack

That right there would allow a Tank to focus purely on Tanking, completely removing the distraction caused by those pesky DPS buttons. In fact, removing those buttons would be a boon for a Tank because they'd get even more mitigation buttons! Think of how much more they could help out Healers if they were reducing party damage even more! Wouldn't that be absolutely swell?

Obvious sarcasm at the end aside, your logic is bullshit. Tanks are allowed to focus on their Role responsibility while also having engaging gameplay (to a point, WAR makes me fall asleep), but Healers are kneecapped and fed the whole "heALers arE SupPOSeD TO HEaL" garbage constantly. It's a complete double standard, and I would love to hear you justify it. And just to get the obvious counter out of the way right now: I am not saying Healers need combos, just something a little extra. A frequent suggestion is giving WHM a Thundercloud-style proc where Dia procs Banish or something. Just a tiny bit of interactivity in the kit to spice up the downtime. Explain to me why something as simple as that is forbidden from Healers while Tanks are out there with proper DPS rotations.

[Liam_Harper]

He ain't wrong though, you want more complex dps rotaion, play a dps then.

Thing they should do instead is remove all tank self healing, which is never gonna happen because tanks will all throw a hissyfit over this, but they made a huge mistake giving them way to much self healing, so that the player that actually has to heal .... only has to do so when there's raidwide aoe's, when the one person who is taking the most damage and should be healed by you never needs it, never understood that design logic honestly.
Or make it so that their self healing is reduced by 90% when inside a dungeon/raid zone, so they can still have it everywhere else; I dunno, but it needs to go if you want healers to be mor engaging to play.

More dps is the wrong solution because that's not the point of rolling healer, those buttons should just be there to have something to do while no healing is needed to throw in once and a while, so in order to fix it is for there to require more healing done, which is never gonna happen this expansion anyway because the devs are to afraid to do anything like that mid expansion.

And here we go with the usual nonsense.

"If you want engaging gameplay, ditch your favorite role". - No thanks. If you want one-dimensional gameplay with a single focus, you go play dps. We play healer because we enjoy being a flexible support.

"They should make tanks more boring to justify keeping healers boring" - Great, sounds exciting. Tank sustain is not a bad thing. How about just making things hit harder so tanks are rewarded for using that sustain well?

"We don't need more dps buttons, requiring more healing done is the magic fix!" - We've been here a million times. Yes, increase healing needed, absolutely. But it's not a fix. Content that will require a newer healer to spam heals constantly at min ilv during prog (the baseline) won't even require healing a third of the time for a geared veteran in a good group with a mitigation plan. The better you are, the more downtime you have. It's a massive difference. Even in Ultimate healers have a ton of downtime. You should be rewarded for playing better, not punished with boredom.

[Jirah]

I’m not bored of the rotation I’m bored that the damage output in all content is so rare and so light.

Healers can be hella fun under very very very specific circumstances core and savage do not provide

[ty_taurus]

I’m not bored of the rotation I’m bored that the damage output in all content is so rare and so light.

Healers can be hella fun under very very very specific circumstances core and savage do not provide

As has been said, and as I've said before, we can't just change up the formula to have WoW-like encounters where raidwides happen every few seconds. It's not how this game is built, it doesn't answer the issue of having nothing to heal and nothing to attack with in all the content that comes before, and quite frankly, the majority of FFXIV's audience can't handle it.

This game is built for combat healers: healers that are designed to feel like DPS-lites that are also responsible for party sustain. Healers should be designed to have the same level of offense as tanks--not almost as much or half as much--exactly as much. That is what this game's content would support. That is not everyone's cup of tea, but it's also an entirely valid and just as if not more valid than healers that only focus on recovery.

Having said all that, there are two key aspects that I believe are important that people who don't want offensive healers would benefit from:

1. We should have a healer who's designed in a way that enables them to contribute offensively as much as the other healers (which is to say, as much as the tanks do as well), but do it in a way that is indirect. I've used the example of making AST's cards GCD, having their effects be played on party members to activate later rather than triggered immediately, and having the acts of drawing and playing cards generate stars that orbit around the AST, which they can then pass onto their teammates through an OGCD action to detonate for Malefic-potency damage. There would still be some use of Malefic, but the majority of their GCD use, even in solo content, would be based around their card gameplay, and using both Malefic and Gravity on occasion. I even removed Combust in that concept to remove the need to manage a timer on an enemy and replaced it with something that just generated multiple stars. This is not the only way this could be accomplished, but having a healer who's DPS is filtered through other party members (or themselves when playing solo) would help give players who don't like offensive healers something to sink their teeth into.

2. While WoW levels of damage taken by the party is not sustainable without a massive rework to the entire game, that doesn't mean we can't have a higher frequency of damage taken by the party, even in casual content. While dungeons are often pathetically weak, max level dungeons should consider having a lower max ilvl so that they're on par with leveling dungeons in terms of how much strength you can have over the content. Additionally, I believe the 2nd and 3rd bosses of Dead Ends showcase how casual content can have a more satisfying frequency of damage taken by the party. Ra-la in particular hits the party with raidwides, spread markers, and stack markers between every mechanic, has one mechanic that is somewhat easy to get clipped by, and another that's easier to avoid, but inflicts max HP doom when you get hit. Meanwhile Barb EX and this tier of savage raids have shown a better frequency of damage to manage for their respective difficulties as well. If we use these pieces of content as the standard to shoot for in future content, I think that would help accomplish providing healers with more things to heal in a way that works with this game, and it's something that those struggling to keep up will be able to grow comfortable with if we stand firm and maintain this momentum rather than backpedaling come 6.3's alliance raid and EX and later 6.4's tier 3 of savage.

If we can rework the healers to fit into the combat healer molds that the content of this game is asking for while accomplishing the points above, I truly believe this would satisfy the largest groups of healers from all angles. Yes, there will still be some who will be dissatisfied, but there will always be someone dissatisfied, and what group we lose is significantly smaller than the group we would gain by fixing healer gameplay.

Additionally, those who want to heal more or who want to focus more on support-based gameplay would still have an avenue that generally encourages more frequent healing and reduces the amount of time spent attacking by supplementing that partially with a support-focused rotation, rather than a direct damage-focused rotation.

[ForsakenRoe]

More dps is the wrong solution because that's not the point of rolling healer, those buttons should just be there to have something to do while no healing is needed to throw in once and a while, so in order to fix it is for there to require more healing done, which is never gonna happen this expansion anyway because the devs are to afraid to do anything like that mid expansion.

You're wrong on every level here, the devs are not too afraid to 'increase healing required' mid expansion, as they did it for this tier. The result? PF's got a massive shortage of healers, to the point where Yoshi-P asked 'please can some non healer mains play healer pleaaaaase'. If that doesn't show every 'we need more healing required' type how horribly wrong they are, I don't know what will. Increasing the level of complexity on the DPS side of healers is the least intrusive, most casual friendly, most veteran-satisfying, most skill-expression-allowing solution to the very simple-to-solve problem. We only have to have this whole song and dance about 'yeh but what if we tried X instead' because 'healers should only heal' players keep trying to muddy the waters, so their easybreezy role of 'press medica 2 occasionally' EX dungeon roulette gameplay can dodge the bullet for another patch. Veterans won't mind the extra complexity (and will welcome it), casuals won't even notice it. Others have posed the question 'why do tanks get a fun rotation and healers dont' but I've tried that one in the past, and every 'i play healer to heal' I've tried to get an answer from either dodges, refuses to answer, genuinely believes that tanks should have a more fun rotation and healers shouldnt (for whatever reason), or the stupidest take i've seen yet, that 'yes tanks should also be lobotomized down to two buttons that sounds lovely'.

So instead, I've taken to asking a different question: What other modern multiplayer game has a healer/support role, where they are specifically designed to ONLY heal? I don't mean 'oh Mercy in OW spends 95% of the time healing' because she has a pistol too, the option to do damage is there. Besides that though, most of the other healers in that game (from what I've heard, I don't play) have interplay between damaging and healing. Classic WoW has skills like Judgement of Light, or wanding the bosses to restore mana via Judgement of Wisdom. There's a boss in Naxx (vanilla) called Loatheb, that prevents you from healing after casting one healing skill, for 60 seconds. In the Wrath version it changes to 16s of 'cant heal' and 4s of 'can heal', from what I understand. Are you seriously telling me that healers should, in the vanilla version of the fight, press their one heal, then sit there with their finger up their backside for 58 seconds waiting for the debuff to fall off, instead of, idk, throwing wand shots or autoattacking with staff bonks or something? Retail WOW has M+, where healers contributing to damage is a massively important factor in whether you time the key or not. So, my assumption is, these 'i play healer to heal' players played one specific expansion of WOW, probably Cata or Mists, where the dev team there decided 'hey we need to make healers have more challenge, lets jack the healing required to stupid high levels' and caused the 'Cata Heroic mass healer shortage incident'.

I would love to see how fast I get reported for playing Apex Legends ranked and refusing to shoot my gun as Lifeline, cos 'im the team medic stop dictating my playstyle'. For an analogy, imagine you and 3 other people are moving something heavy, a wardrobe or such. That's your dungeon team of 4. Moving the heavy wardrobe and doing a dungeon run are both 'team efforts'. Refusing to do damage as a healer, in a game that is very specifically designed around very large amounts of 'healer DPS uptime', is the equivalent of one person not only not helping to carry the wardrobe, but sitting on top of it and making the whole job harder for the other 3.

[Anxin]

So instead, I've taken to asking a different question: What other modern multiplayer game has a healer/support role, where they are specifically designed to ONLY heal?

I'm uncertain if you can call it modern, but Guild Wars 1 often required the solo healer to only heal and support. You were too busy doing that to do anything else! Even when there were two healers/supporters you were too busy throwing out heals and buffs and debuffs to worry about damage. And all of it without scripted AOE dodging and other things. The admittedly simple AI kept you alert, in part because healers were the AI's primary targets for debuffs and sudden damage spikes. Honestly, I miss solo healing for parties of 8.

The FF14 healing kits are powerful enough that you often don't need a cohealer. I've switched from healer to dancer and that class has enough healing for a team that plays well in casual content (just a small boost and another healing skill would make the class a pretty solid healer in its own way).

[ty_taurus]

I'm uncertain if you can call it modern, but Guild Wars 1 often required the solo healer to only heal and support. You were too busy doing that to do anything else! Even when there were two healers/supporters you were too busy throwing out heals and buffs and debuffs to worry about damage. And all of it without scripted AOE dodging and other things. The admittedly simple AI kept you alert, in part because healers were the AI's primary targets for debuffs and sudden damage spikes. Honestly, I miss solo healing for parties of 8.

The FF14 healing kits are powerful enough that you often don't need a cohealer. I've switched from healer to dancer and that class has enough healing for a team that plays well in casual content (just a small boost and another healing skill would make the class a pretty solid healer in its own way).

Guild Wars 1 was launched in 2005 and received content updates up to 2010, so I wouldn’t say it’s modern in the context of the question.