What Healer kit (not encounter) change would make GCD heals NOT bad gameplay?

[Renathras]

You didn't mention in your original post that any suggestions have to take into account people who don't use DoTs at all so I don't know why you made that a condition now.

Not "making it a condition", just asking the question. What I'm pointing out is, while it may be a solution, it won't fit all situations/players well.

Hello
My opinion on the problem as other have said is oGCD negating GCDS.

Thank you for your input. I said something similar once about stuff like PI being good oGCDs because they do nothing alone. They need a GCD to interact with them.

I think the a 5.3 storm’s eye style qol would be possible to help with uptime in the event that this was a chosen solution.

Honestly, that isn't a terrible idea, though I think the issue then becomes the BRD Iron Jaws thing. If the buff's potency is maintained at the applied level only, this means letting your raid buffed application fall off would be a mass damage loss and continuing a pre-raid buffed application within the raid buff window would be a damage loss. The second can be fixed some by making a higher potency version overwrite, so it would update to the raid buffed potency, but that would mean a playstyle of always refreshing a smidge early to keep the raid buff application up, which is even more punishing if it falls off in exchange for being more idiot proof at the bottom end. I do think allowing it to extend up to 60 seconds might be helpful, though if there's a way to address that.

As to the latter: Well, WHM's don't stock a ton of lilies for the 2 min burst now. You still use Misery at the 1 minute one. Because you can't stack to a second Blood Lily. So suppose WHM COULD generate Blood Lily from 3x Cure 1s.

You have used Cures/Lilies prior to your burst so you're sitting on a Misery ready to go. Burst starts and you cast Misery, Cure 1, Cure 1, Cure 1, Misery. This is damage neutral to you having just cast Misery, Glare, Glare, Glare, Glare. Moreover, you could TECHNICALLY do this right now. Go into your 2 min raid buffs with one Misery ready and 3 Lily Blooms (the third blooms just as you enter burst). Misery, Rapture, Rapture, Rapture, Misery. This is literally the same result (well, if we were using Medica instead of Cure 1). Misery, Solace, Solace, Solace, Misery would be the same as Misery, Cure 2, Cure 2, Cure 2, Misery, except the latter actually costs MP and requires you to stand still for the casts, making it more difficult to play/harder to optimize on movement vs the Solaces.

I'm not sure how this is extremely cursed, or, at least, any more cursed than WHM is right now...

Eh, people will play to the standard that the content expects of them,...

Maybe, it's hard to say.

I suspect my bias/hate of DoTs is at play in part, but I've noticed this does seem to be something high end players are very good at and low end ones are very bad at. People in the middle (which I probably am) are also not great at it. In general, DoTs falling off is the biggest mistake I consistently see of players.

I'm also not sure if people would adapt or not. Even back in HW there were WHMs that didn't cast any DoTs at all. I remember tanking for some sprouts in HW, Sohm Al, I think it was. SCH, BRD, and SMN. Literally none of them knew what a DoT was or how to use it. I didn't even go into Cleric stance with the SCH, I just explained to all of them how to use DoTs.
...how to USE DoTs.

Their uptime wasn't good, after, but I at least saw the debuffs. (And got three comms for my efforts.)

Point is, I don't think it's a silver bullet solution. I genuinely do think things like Misery are better.

They're all "Heal target for X potency" or "Heal entire party for X potency", there is no synergy, nothing but "Make HP bar go up by X" and the skills that break this mold are few and far between.

There aren't a ton, but there are some. Though I'm curious what you're thinking instead? What we have right now:

Direct refilling of health bars (most standard cures, a secondary effect of most healing oGCDs)
Refiling smaller amounts of health over time (GCDs like Regen, oGCDs like Physis, field effects like Asylum)
Both of the above, an initial cure then a trickle of additional healing (Medica 2)
Barrier overlapping health bar (Benison and Holos, with other things having barrier + healing)
Barrier and heal filling health bars (Adlo, etc)
Reactive healing/heal in reaction to damage (Lilybell, Excogitation)
Not heal itself but boost healing (Fey Illumination, Plenary Indulgence)
Percent reduction in incoming damage (Temperance, Soil, etc)
Health bar increasing effects (Protraction)

Those seem like a lot of different ways/effects to me. Do they not to you?

^this is why I don’t actually dislike the way SCH has 4 phases and they all interrupt each other, you should be punished for using your healing options at the wrong time, heals should have a purpose and if you use them at the wrong time there should be consequences

The consequence used to be related to MP management or being more taxed/stressed later (e.g. if you blow all your oGCDs at once and have to scramble with GCD heals later).

As this game is fully dps driven, thats why GCD heals are considered bad, in most cases these arent needed, so using one means losing dps. dps dps dps, thats all the game cares about. If the game would dish out damage values that force healers into using the GCD's, that wouldnt be an issue at all, as then instead of the dps focus, it truly becomes a game of keeping people alive (and their mistakes then will result in deaths faster rather than having a vuln stack that usualy expires without problems). It would make those abilities usefull, and add towards the healer experience. We are called healers, force us into healing!

But more damage has 1 side effect: if the healer dies and you dont have revives, the healer is going to be blamed for the wipe, where in plenty of cases if the tank dies, while it might cause the team to take heavy hits, a delayed revive can still save a lot. A safeguard a healer only has when a dps also can revive. Thats another issue they would then need to resolve.

Hm. I think I pretty much agree with all of this. The encounter design is kind of a problem.

To this day, l still can't get the why healer needs to contribute to dps check.

I get why healers doing damage isn't bad - can speed kills - but I agree that healer damage shouldn't be how DPS checks are calculated. I think the fear is that for it NOT to be counted, healers need to do very little personal damage (right now, they do around 50-60% of a DPS). If not, a really good DPSing healer could make up for your team having bad DPS players if said Healer is able to optimize and output enough damage to help them clear the encounter that was tuned for 0 healer DPS. That is, the encounter expected none, so if your 1-2 healers are doing 1.2 or so DPSers worth of damage, it could make the encounter trivial (if your DPS are good) or clearable with really poor DPS players (if they are not).

You COULD fix that by just making healer Jobs do really small damage, like only 10-20% of a DPSers, but now you have healers trying to do those MSQ solo instance fights and not being able to clear the DPS checks (like at the end of SB where Elidibus as Zenos summons the swords and you have to kill them all before the gauge fills), meaning they either have to give healers a special buff in those instances or program special alternatives like NPC helpers to do the fighting for you, which can change some story beats (like when you're supposed to be all alone, such as the 5.3 fight gauntlet in Amaurot). Not to mention stuff like Deep Dungeons. There's not an elegant way to really fix this outside of something like that BLU ability that buffs them when solo (Primal Instinct?) doing instances alone, but even that has a bunch of conditions and caveats (like it has to be an instance "designed for more than one player").

But the other extreme is what we have now, where it's destroyed healing as a role and stretched the trinity to its breaking point.

Another alternative would be if healing was actually taxing, so we had to use GCD heals, and damage spells and GCD heals were comparable in MP consumption to the point casting too many damage ones means you don't have enough MP for healing. But that runs a lot of other risks. While that might still be preferable to what we have now - and would make healers focused on healing again and GCD heals viable uses of a GCD - it has its own risks such as bad situations snowaballing, and as healers get more gear, they can still shift into more damage, so it leads to the same problem in some ways, depending on how it's implemented.

I dunno, there are reasons behind both sides.

Would spamming GCD heals with OGCD damage spells be more engaging than spamming GCD damage spells with OGCD healing though? It sounds like the same thing, just reversed. I'd rather see kit diversification to make both GCD heals and GCD damage spells interplay with each other so you have a more or less equal time on both, encounter design would also need to change to necessitate GCD heals.

I'm not sure about "more engaging" but "feel more like a healer/less like a DPSer" would be one difference.