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

[ty_taurus]

well I would agree its a balancing act to be sure, as when I'm playing healer and people aren't taking a lot of damage it can be a bit old having 1 main and possibly one aoe attack, and I totally understand the idea that even the healers wanting to contribute more dps. but there's the other side of the coin, when the group is taking more damage and the healer is still expected to keep up the same amount of dps even though they are now much more busy actually healing. And this can happen on the same map with different groups so how do you properly balance when the healer does what?

Before I answer that, I want to point something about about DPS checks, healers, and healing responsibilities. The only fights that have DPS checks are EX content and beyond. Everything else doesn't have a DPS check, so it doesn't matter if you were to theoretically get overwhelmed healing because the boss isn't going to do anything with this extra time it's taking to clear a fight.

As for EX content and beyond, the experience of running these forms of content has 3 distinct phases: prog, first clear, and reclears. While in prog, your DPS doesn't matter unless you have some type of mini DPS check like the flames or add phase of P3S, but that's not super common in this game, and I'll return to this in a moment. Beyond that, whether or not anyone in the party is DPSing is irrelevant, because your goal is to see and learn mechanics. Only after you get through those mechanics does DPS begin to matter. Once you reach that point, your party isn't making mistakes often enough for that to be an issue, and if they are, you're not hitting the DPS check anyway. Also, a party mess up is something that doesn't take long to recover from. In savage and ultimate, healers are still in the 80%+ range of time spent DPSing. Once you get to reclears, this process only refines itself more and more.

Additionally, the bulk of healing resources are designed innately to not interfere with your DPS. The vast majority of healing healers will use is OGCD. What DPS spells is that interrupting? Or you have the lily system on WHM, which not only refunds your lost damage, but can also be optimized to increase WHM's damage output.

As for mini DPS checks, the system we have already handles this quite well. Doing P3S as SGE, I never had to drop attacking birds because I had OGCDs, and I could cast an E. Prognosis between phases when there were no targets. Every healer can manage this quite fairly. Whether it's having OGCDs, or having GCD heals that refund your DPS, healers have the tools necessary to get through these phases, and even if you are struggling, isn't the point of savage to be difficult and to ask players to improve and polish their performance?

Ultimately though, this comment has been brought up many times before, and I want to ask, where does it honestly apply? Because as someone who does content that has DPS checks, I do not see where this is a problem. I don't see it now in tier 2 savage either where I'm playing as a DNC, and the healing is left up to my teammates instead of me. So I'd really like to know why people think this is a problem that's going to prevent players from clearing content. The biggest group of people it affects are week 1 raiders who are at the cream of the crop for their roles generally. Those healers are not playing as poorly as the casual healer who would struggle in that environment, but casual healers don't go to that environment to begin with. What's the issue?

[AnotherPerson]

well I would agree its a balancing act to be sure, as when I'm playing healer and people aren't taking a lot of damage it can be a bit old having 1 main and possibly one aoe attack, and I totally understand the idea that even the healers wanting to contribute more dps. but there's the other side of the coin, when the group is taking more damage and the healer is still expected to keep up the same amount of dps even though they are now much more busy actually healing. And this can happen on the same map with different groups so how do you properly balance when the healer does what?

I think your question answers itself. DPS comes second to healing primarily. The problem is that Healer DPS is a downtime thing that happens so far and frequently that people tend to forget healer DPS comes second and healer prioritizes on healing and survival first. If you're placed in a position where you need to heal, then you spend time to heal and even dip onto your GCD heals to stabilize the situation. If you're talking about lossless DPS, we already have skills that handle this - oGCD healing tools. Tools that refund DPS. We have so much of them that it's basically impossible to not DPS and heal at the same time. Players simply weave their healing between DPSing. However, there's still nothing to do when you don't need to heal, which is what everyone complains about when playing healer.

If you're worried that healers need to keep up the same amount of DPS even if they are now busy actually healing, it means that healers... finally need to use GCD heals? So the button isn't obsolete? Isn't that a good thing? Overall DPS skills can simply increase in potency to offset the need to GCD heal more frequently.

[AnotherPerson]

but there's the other side of the coin, when the group is taking more damage and the healer is still expected to keep up the same amount of dps even though they are now much more busy actually healing.

Oh, I also want to add - having more DPS skills that isn't just simply a 1-2-3 rotation actually benefits healers more if we're talking about maintaining a similar level of dps.

The less total damage coming from their single target attack is, the bigger the percentage will come from stronger attacks (which would be their DPS skills). That means even if DPS skills are tied to a cooldown or a mechanic, the fact that a bigger portion of the total DPS originates from these skills as opposed to their main attack skill means a bigger portion of their damage is preserved even when they need to GCD heal because their DPS is condensed into stronger bursts of damage as opposed to sustained damage. So yes, actually, having a bigger DPS rotation makes healers easier to keep up their DPS even if they had to GCD heal more.

You can see this effect happening with Sage to a limited degree.
Because Dosis is lower in potency and Phlegma + Eukrasian Dosis is higher, these two skills has a bigger impact on DPS than Dosis per GCD. If there are more DPS skills and with slightly lower cooldowns, then the number of Dosis casts can be replaced with these skills and the overall DPS of a healer increases.

The effect of having more DPS skills that have a higher potency than their main attack skill reduces the maximum variance on the output that the main attack skill can do. So for example, missing more casts of Dosis or replacing them for GCD heals will impact your DPS less because a larger bulk of the damage comes from other skills. You can see this effect happen to tanks (GNB with their cartridge gauge, DRK with their bloodspiller gauge + MP based attacks, WAR with Fell Cleaves and Inner Release, etc.) The amount of damage coming from their heavy hitting skills contribute to a larger portion of their total DPS than their 1-2-3 combo. Unlike tanks, healers has even less to lose if they need to GCD heal, purely because Dosis / Malefic / Broil / Glare is not tied to a DPS gauge at all. All tanks want to keep their 1-2-3 rotation and DPS uptime because the combos either generate resources for their job gauge or unlock heavier hitting skills. Healers can sidestep this issue entirely based on the implementation.

Therefore, it isn't too difficult to expect healers to keep the same amount of DPS even if they need to GCD heal more frequently. Plus, there's still plenty of oGCD healing skills remaining (a lot of them can be merged, so it's not as if consolidating the number of skills will result in a huge loss in healing output either).

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

No. You will spam 1 button 85% of time and you will like it.

/s

[Kikio_The_Blu]

I remember another healer main attacked me when I said we really do need more dps spells to make them feel less boring.

>"So you want what is basically an extra spell that does what glare does already? Cool waste of time"

No, I want to have a 1-2 dps combo chain like most classes but for healers so I am not quite literally PRESSING THE SAME BUTTON on repeat for 30 seconds and occasionally stopping to heal and/or reapply my dot. I don't even care if it comes at the cost of decreasing the potency of the main single-target, just give us a fucking basic combo chain!

[Semirhage]

I want more downtime complexity, but if I had developer input, I wouldn't want it to come as melee DPS-style combo chains. 1-2-3 merely changes which buttons I'm pressing, but it doesn't make me think at all. RDM or DNC style rotations are much more my style. They don't make you think much, but their light semi-random nature forces me to pay attention to which thing I'm hitting. I want to have a split second decision, and that decision can be wrong, and I want my punishment for being wrong to be a small potency loss. That's good enough for government work.

[Niroken]

I wouldn't specifically add a standard dps rotation but more of what Sage (and somewhat White Mage) where you can do X to build to additional damage abilities. The issue is the frequency. Sage isn't as bad with this since you have Phlegma as a filler but White Mage you basically need to waste/use three lilies to use your damage spell which can take a bit of time per Afflatus Misery.

1 spammable damage skill, 1 spammable DoT, 1 built up single target nuke, 1 built up AoE nuke should be a minimum in my opinion with additional variations for each of the healers.

[ty_taurus]

I wouldn't specifically add a standard dps rotation but more of what Sage (and somewhat White Mage) where you can do X to build to additional damage abilities. The issue is the frequency. Sage isn't as bad with this since you have Phlegma as a filler but White Mage you basically need to waste/use three lilies to use your damage spell which can take a bit of time per Afflatus Misery.

1 spammable damage skill, 1 spammable DoT, 1 built up single target nuke, 1 built up AoE nuke should be a minimum in my opinion with additional variations for each of the healers.

WHM actually has more DPS gameplay options. Assize is basically Phlegma just OGCD instead. Both are 40 second DPS cooldowns. But WHM has Afflatus Misery in addition to that which itself is not a bad tool, but isn't adding much more to the engagement factor, but it's more than SGE has.

[Sani2341]

I wouldn't specifically add a standard dps rotation but more of what Sage (and somewhat White Mage) where you can do X to build to additional damage abilities. The issue is the frequency. Sage isn't as bad with this since you have Phlegma as a filler but White Mage you basically need to waste/use three lilies to use your damage spell which can take a bit of time per Afflatus Misery.

1 spammable damage skill, 1 spammable DoT, 1 built up single target nuke, 1 built up AoE nuke should be a minimum in my opinion with additional variations for each of the healers.

Issue is, while WHM's blood lily is damage neutral and you, afaik, need to use the lily gcds anyways so it is no extra effort to generate. SGE requires you to use GCD tools you usualy don't need for anything but generating resources for toxicon. Which is an overall dmg loss, iirc even compared to refreshing your dot early. And the threee free stacks we get at the start of an instance are often the only ones used unless there's downtime where spamming shields isn't costing you chances to cast dosis

[ForsakenRoe]

>"So you want what is basically an extra spell that does what glare does already? Cool waste of time"

By this logic, why did SE add Xenoglossy when BLM already used Foul even in singletarget? Why add Senei when SAM used Guren in ST? Why have any of the elemental stuff for RDM when Jolt and Impact also generate BWmana? It's not the fact that spell X and spell Y both do damage, it's the context in which they do that damage. If we add a spell that does, for example, 20-40p more damage than a Glare, but is on a 15s CD, then you can't just spam that new spell, and you can't just spam Glare (well, you could but you'd lose a tiny bit of damage). Once again I will link this video, where you can see me demonstrate how much of a difference two small changes (Dia duration 12s instead of 30, new 15s CD GCD skill) can make to the rotation. And I'll relink the pie charts of 'what GCDs would be used per minute now vs if I redesigned the job'

(Banish is a 15s CD GCD. Dia is 12s duration. BOTE is a heal skill that procs one cast of Quake Tornado Flood. Those three skills replace Glare, Dia, Banish respectively on the hotbars.
As such, you could count the Dia press count as 6, and the Glare press count as 8. It is still a far cry from the current 18 Glares per minute we have.)

I want more downtime complexity, but if I had developer input, I wouldn't want it to come as melee DPS-style combo chains. 1-2-3 merely changes which buttons I'm pressing, but it doesn't make me think at all. RDM or DNC style rotations are much more my style.

Agreed, a 123 is a lot more restrictive in terms of what order you can use things, what breaks the combo, etc. It took till this patch to get Atonement to stop breaking combo. I feel like having a conditional buff to use a different skill, rather than a hard enforced 1-2 is better. Mostly because going from 111 to 123 is not actually that interesting either. If they condensed the RDM 123 into one button, it's not going to suddenly be way more boring and ruin the class, right? But if they were to make VerAero/VerThunder turn automatically into 'the 5s spell that you have less ColorMana for', that would definitely be more brain-off and bad for the class. So, things for healers, like 'when your shield breaks on SGE, you get (new buff), which allows a use of Phlegma without regard to it's cooldown', this would make using a shield a potency loss of 60 instead of 330, allow banking an extra mobility spell potentially, frees up Toxicon and Addersting to be something way more interesting than 'scuffed Ruin 2', etc. Or for WHM, the whole Quake Tornado etc thing. I don't think anyone would find it quite as fun, cool, etc if, rather than what I've suggested, we just have 'oh yeh, Glare combos into Quake as a 1-2 combo'

Also, the only healer/casters to actually have 123 style combo actions (unless I'm somehow forgetting one) are RDM, on it's melee combo, and SMN, on it's melee-based Ifrit thing. 123 is inherently a melee-centric design choice, and 'X ready' procs are moreso used for the healers and casters.