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

[Zeastria]

I also want to point out that:
it's all right to not like a job/role -> but it doesn't automatically mean it's something wrong with said job/role..
It can also be the fact that it isn't for you..

[WaxSw]

I would like to also point out that most of the complaints are backed with real ingame data so they're not just a matter of like/dislike, otherwise we woudn't have those multiple logs with healers having over 50% of their time pressing one button as well as multiple videos that show how needless the total healing actions that the role have are in the way of 0-1 healer clears of all content, even ultimates.

It would be weird that the role isn't for the people that have more experience and have played it the most too.

[Renathras]

I mean having two buttons to press like a mch rotation to keep uptime is more engaging than 11111111111 forever. Even if it adds nothing of value it adds interest to the class, and I would rather have a class be interesting than feel like im falling asleep piloting it in savages.

This depends on the person. There are several usual posters here - ones who want more damage buttons, mind you - that say a 1-2-3 rotation is the same as 111 and they are opposed to it.

It's why the ideal solution is to have different things on the different Healer Jobs, not just replace "they all have the same thing" with "they all have the same thing, it's just different from the first thing". Look at Melee, for example. In the 5 Melee Jobs, their rotations are:

DRG: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-0-5-4 repeat (or something loosely akin to that)
MNK: 1-2-3-4-5-6-1-2-6-4-5-3-1-2-6-4-5-6 repeat (ignoring the Blitz mechanic)
NIN: 1-2-4-1-2-3-...-3-1-2-4 repeat (you can use two -4 combos together and then not have to do another for 60 sec, so there's flexibility, but it's that)
SAM: 1-2-3-1-4-1-5-6 repeat (the order can be changed depending on what you're doing, and Meikyo you use with just -2-4-6, the finishers of each of the three)
RPR: ??? Haven't touched it, but looking at the actions and looking at the Balance guide, the core rotation appears to be (someone can correct this if they want, but it's not really relevant to the point) 1-2-3, it kinda has a -4, but Shadow of Death isn't part of its combo (so is more like Huraijin, except you want to use it) (with a bunch of spenders and stuff thrown in), then it has the burst combos, using different buttons (instead of context changing those), but...yeah, you get the idea.

Point is, they're all different. No two of them can be perfectly mapped together. If you put NIN's 1-2-3 where you put SAM's 1-2-3, then put NIN's -4 where you put SAM's -4, then attempt to play NIN like SAM pressing 1-2-3-1-4...see where the problem comes in? For one thing, Huton wouldn't refresh since Armor Crush doesn't refresh it unless it's part of a properly executed 1-2-4 combo.

Taking all four Healers and giving them a 1-2-3 wouldn't really make them different, it'd just make them a different flavor of all the same, which is the problem. Yes yes, I know "they're all boring" is the problem (to some people), but making them a different same doesn't really fix anything, as even that will get boring. The point is that they should change it up. Take a page from Melee and have each Healer Job have a different rotation. If every Melee played like NIN in 5 aesthetic flavors, it'd be bad design, not good design. No matter how interesting you might find a 1-2-3, giving all Healers the same thing doesn't fix the problem.

Oh, and note that I'm not opposed to a healer having a 1-2-3. I'd actually like ONE to. I think it would fit SGE best, and I hate DoTs, so getting rid of that would be fine with me. I absolutely hate that every Healer's mainline rotation is "DoT + spamnuke until DoT refresh', since I absolutely hate DoTs. Having a Healer that had a 1-2-3 rotation instead of 2-1-1-1-1-1-1 I would prefer.

But I don't think every Healer should have the same rotation. That's the point I'm getting at.

I also want to point out that:
it's all right to not like a job/role -> but it doesn't automatically mean it's something wrong with said job/role..
It can also be the fact that it isn't for you..

Exactly.

I would like to also point out that most of the complaints are backed with real ingame data so they're not just a matter of like/dislike,

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".

That said: My position, again, is to mix them up. Being all the same means no one can escape if they dislike the way it plays. Again, it'd be like if every Melee played like NIN. That'd be great for the people who like how NIN plays and can now do it in 5 aesthetic flavors, but it wouldn't be so great for the people who like how DRG or MNK play.

It would be weird that the role isn't for the people that have more experience and have played it the most too.

This is always, 100% of the time, a bad argument.

"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.

No, one group does not get exclusive "super-delegate" powers regarding design discussions.

[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.

.

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.

.

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

[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.

[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"