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

[WaxSw]

But they are.

Keep in mind those metrics are broken down into like/dislike. It's not a case of "just the facts, ma'am". People aren't saying "Healers use 70% of their GCDs on a single button". People are saying "Healers use 70% of their GCDs on a single button over and over again and I find that boring and don't like it".

Not exactly. Its a fact that healers aren't a requirement for the hardest content as that can be cleared without them, its a fact that well liked tools that players enjoyed were removed from the game in favor of that overbloat of healing actions that no content really push for their use and those two combined show that healer design has suffered over the years

The problem about 1 button is not the button per se but how, if we listen to what the dev team says (in Mr Happy's interview for example), they know that 1 button spam is a problematic design but at the same time they enforce it with barely any healing check and high dps checks, they want the players (at least the least skilled) to feel good about how they heal yet they've given so much sustain to all the roles and made the normal modes hit so little that healers become unnecesary. The reward systems of the role are all over the place and one does not need a degree in game design to see it.

Citing Nolan Bushnell "All the best games are easy to learn and difficult to master. They should reward the first quarter and the hundredth." yet healers fail miserably, the reward of the the first quarter is something that isn't really necessary and in the hundredth quarter there is not even a glimpse of a reward system. The current healer design situation is even more sad when you realize that SE has shown they can make the "1 button reward" rotation properly in BLM and its Fire 4 spell.

"played it the most"? Many people who have never set foot in Savage have spent years playing these Jobs. How do we define "played it the most"? If someone started in ShB and has Savage and Ultimate clears but 50 days played vs someone who has played for 500 days going back to 2.X but never touched a Savage or Ultimate, who has "played it the most" between them? Who has "more experience"? Not to mention the various Jobs within the role have played differently from both each other and even from themselves over time/through the expansions.

Thats why I said played the most AND have more experience. It's not just a matter of how many hours you've put into them but how many situations have you experienced with the role and how deep with its systems you've gone because, and I think anyone can agree with this, someone who has put a lot of time into the role and has deep knowledge and experience is not someone who would fall under the "It can also be the fact that it isn't for you..".

This is not about any group having a "super-delegate" powers its about not dismissing arguments that come from a place of experience and knowledge with childish arguments.

The role should work for the first quarter and the hundreth and both should be listened, this is why BLM is such a well designed job while healers have seen several years of non stop complaints.

Edit cause copy pasted things in wrong order

[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.

.

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

[Silver-Strider]

I don't think this is correct.

I actually looked at some of the worst ranked groups that cleared P12S P2 to see just how badly you'd have to play and still get a clear of the fight.
Lowest SCH was a 4 Gray parse.

118 Broil Casts
84% DoT uptime
18 GCD heals cast

Of the ~80k rDPS required to clear the fight, they contributed 4.6k.

Their biggest downfall? Not a single cast of Chain Stratagem the entire fight.

Something I believe you are forgetting in regards to old DoTs is how often they had to be reapplied. It isn't like now where they last 30s and are easily forgotten because of how little you need to reapply them. Before, you were lucky to get 4 Broil casts in a row before needing to reapply a DoT. With how weak your nuke was back then, there was a very noticeable difference in how quickly a fight finished, depending on if you maintained your DoTs or not. However, because of how weak your nuke was, it was a lot easier to replace it with a GCD heal since it contributed so little to your overall DPS at the time. It's why Healer requirements were higher, because you didn't have to spend as much time using your filler spell as you do now because most of your damage was passive.

[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.

[Semirhage]

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!)

People answer this problem constantly. You just don't like the answer to it, so you ignore it.

Let's get rid of a sizeable portion of oGCD heals. Let's make people GCD heal ten times more than they need to right now.

Yippee. Now I have to GCD heal ten times more than I do now. Let's take the fact that GCD heals in this game are boring, don't provide much avenue for choice, etc and put it in that box over there for the moment since it's a different topic. Okay, cool. Now that I'm sitting in this hypothetical future where GCD healing is more prevalent, I'm going to try to gain skill to reach the point where I minimize my healing. What do I look forward to?

Glare. Glare. Glare. Glare. Glare. Glare. Glare. Glare.

I'd like my reward to be head and shoulders more satisfying than that. And it'll still be boring as snot in GCD healer Sylphieland.

[Renathras]

Let's take the fact that GCD heals in this game are boring,

THEN HOW DO YOU MAKE THEM NOT BORING?

Again, what is your issue with Healing in the game right now?

1) That Healers aren't needed?
2) That Healing is boring?
3) That DPSing on Healers is boring?

If your solution fixes (3), while your answer is (1), (2), or "all three", then your solution doesn't work.

So, how do you make healing not boring? What does that look like? Because if you do that, it fixes (2) and probably (1) at the same time.

THEN we can talk about more DPS options, once we've ensured that Healers are at least needed to clear content, which seems to be the bigger problem considering how often it's mentioned and how people continue to insist it's important even when I point out the edge cases aren't - but I do note that the general principle is correct, just the edge cases aren't how you prove that (looking at 4 mans is how you prove that).

...or is that somehow NOT a problem and people mentioning it are just throwing the kitchen sink out to try and make their argument stronger, not realizing (or caring) that it doesn't support their actual position?

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EDIT:

And no. For the record, people DON'T answer the question. They ignore it or talk about something else, as you just did, ignoring that the "more dps buttons" doesn't prevent another "0 Healer Ultimate" in any way. Healers with DPS buttons but without encounters requiring more healing just ends up being "the weaker DPS you bring for comfort then drop when you feel like it", which is identical to Healers in the game now, so doesn't fix anything.

And also: "getting to do DPS" isn't rewarding.

[ty_taurus]

And also: "getting to do DPS" isn't rewarding.

Opinion.

And no. For the record, people DON'T answer the question. They ignore it or talk about something else...

It has been answered before. Group content of any difficulty level should have enough damage that bringing a healer is required no matter your skill level--the sustain provided by non-healer jobs is not powerful and/or frequent enough to replace the accessible healing provided by healer jobs. This can be accomplished by either increasing the frequency of unavoidable damage, pruning or limited non-healer sustain, or a combination of both. Moreover, Ultimate should have high enough outgoing damage that healing through tests your ability to managing all of your healing resources.

THEN HOW DO YOU MAKE THEM NOT BORING?

1. Balance outgoing damage around what healing healers can provide. Easier content can still be forgiving, but if you're going to give jobs like White Mage and Sage free healing resources every 20 seconds, for example, give those healers reasons to use those.
2. Create opportunities for the healer to make decisions within their own toolkit. As a small example, rather than putting a cooldown on something, give it a steep MP cost with no cooldown. Make the player choose when to take advantage of whatever potent effect that spell has by managing their MP rather than just waiting for it to be ready again.
3. Reward optimal healing with fun and interesting gameplay. For most people, that means more interesting DPS rotations that allow you to shorten the duration of an encounter and increase the rest of your party's margin for error. I'm sorry that you're in a select minority of gamers who find damage extremely unappealing, but that's generally what most gamers look for in video games; that includes players who opt for healing and support roles. There is a subset of players who prefer to focus on support. If only there was a job that rewarded optimal healing by empowering their teammates instead of themselves. That would ideally be what is designed to appeal to players within your subset.