Latest Official Developer Statements About Healer DPS?

[IDontPetLalas]

Yes sage IS the dps healer, it's been from the start. The problem is that also from the start, it received the same scholar copy pasta in the end. See the contradiction ?

See pvp for sage's true design

I would agree with what you're saying, however I would word it somewhat differently- first of all I would agree that the healers are actually most interesting in PVP, since that is where SE showed some creative design differences even though very few skills are used for each healer, leading to no extraneous skills and there's no spamming of one of two skills to the detriment of the others.

Wit regards to sage in particular, I would also agree that of all the healers in PVP, although it brings utility it is more DPS focussed (and is more successful when played that way from my limited experience as as sage in PVP - as it's not my favourite job in PVP). However that isn't the case in PVE where it really isn't so different from a scholar

[DiaDeem]

I don't wanna deal more DPS, I wanna do more meaningful healing, remove ailments and apply buffs to my party. Spreading a DoT and creating a DoT area are not really very interesting DPS actions anyway...

[Supersnow845]

^yoshi said so much about SGE that turned out to not be true so I would take any comment relating to SGE with a grain of salt

[BaconBits]

Talking about grains of salt, grab a fistful of salt any time Yoshi-P says anything.

[Aravell]

^yoshi said so much about SGE that turned out to not be true so I would take any comment relating to SGE with a grain of salt

I'm not entirely sure why people still fully believe everything he says, given that he's also the guy that said back in SB that WHM had to do the bulk of the healing while SCHs just spent most of their time on doing damage.

[Supersnow845]

I'm not entirely sure why people still fully believe everything he says, given that he's also the guy that said back in SB that WHM had to do the bulk of the healing while SCHs just spent most of their time on doing damage.

He also said that Midas would be between second and final coil in difficulty

That’s about when I realised he is either not telling the truth or he is uniformed about his own game

[ForsakenRoe]

Think about it - how in-depth would a healer rotation in Lapis Manalis have to be for you not to be bored? Would a 1-2-3 not still be boring? (As noted in that ongoing discussion in the Healer forum right now, everyone seems to agree that wouldn't do it). What about a SMN rotation? No, that gets called boring all the time as well. So it would have to be a full on DPSer rotation before "more DPS buttons" would really fix the problem. Dia having a Thundercloud proc would be novel for...a week. A 1-2-3 Stone-Aero-Water combo would be boring overnight.

I think the issue is that nothing WOULD actually make 4 man casual content NOT boring for high end players such as yourself or others like you, unless we get something either high APM like GNB or DPSer level difficult like BLM. And at that point, we run into all the attendant issues of Healers having full on DPS rotations.

Moreover, an additional issue:

UNLESS the damage gap between optimal and "glarespammer" is small, then when you get a Healer that does the bare minimum, now you're extending the time the run takes to the point of really annoying regular people, and we run into people just dropping healers and doing 1T/3D premades (even more than they do now). Meaning people's "get in, get out" runs will take even longer, leading to even...more...complaints.

Did you purposely ignore all of the previous times we've been over this or did they all just happen to slip your mind? Jumping to '123 would get boring fast' despite all of the times where many people in the Healer section have said '123 is the most uncreative way to try and solve this, why not try X or Y' is pretty disingenuous. It's like you're trying to frame the topic as very new, so you can ignore all the previous discussion on it and start the debate from a 'blank slate' position

For WHM, as I have said many times (but I guess I'll link to it again while the opportunity presents itself), reduce Dia to 12s duration, add a new Banish GCD skill with 15s CD. That's all I would need for WHM. These two changes alone would result in this being the rotation, and with the other, more healing-side-of-the-kit focused additions that I'd also implement if I were able to design WHM, this would be the use-count for each of the GCDs in the kit. For anyone not familiar with my rambling rants over in Healer-Zone, Blessing Of The Elementals (BOTE) would be a 500p AOE heal that costs gauge built by using GCD heals or damage skills, and Quake Flood and Tornado would replace Glare Banish and Dia for one cast of each (think Fell Cleave turning into Inner Chaos), to function as a damage refund for BOTE in a similar vein to Misery refunding Solace/Rapture's damage costs.

Again, I'm not asking for GNB or BLM, and I don't expect GNB or BLM tier rotations on any of the healers, not even on SGE. I'm asking, on the damage side of things for WHM, for one new button and one DOT duration to be shortened. That is nowhere near even WAR or SMN. It's a false equivalence to try and compare what I am asking for to any other class in the game, because even with the suggestions I ask for, it'd still be 'more simple' than anything else we currently have in the game. Even if we added everything from my WHM ideas, the 'damage side' of things only gains a 60s CD to throw your odd minute Misery into. Beyond that, there's like 3 heal/mitigation buttons, and a whole boatload of 'skill we used to have, but reworked to be lowerlevel version of current kit', like bringing back Divine Seal as a lower version of Temperance.

And finally, I have said many times that SE can make the potency difference between the filler spell (Glare) and the 'extra complexity' skills (Banish) be lower to punish people less if they 'do the rotation wrong'. As an example, I would make Banish only 40p more than Glare. If someone spams Glare and ignores Banish under my design, they would lose 160p per minute. Half a Glare. Less damage than Crit Variance can steal from you. Trying to assert the 'what if healer does bare minimum' line as a reason to not have any additions to the damage side of the kit is equal parts comical and sad, because the last EX roulette I did on a non-healer, I was PLD and the healer was a SGE who used more E.Diagnosis than Dosis. They put Kardia on me, and then seemed to actively avoid pressing any buttons that would actually trigger Kardia. The run took longer because of that, but that SGE did not get kicked, because none of the other three of us cared enough. We still finished in less than 20mins, so no harm no foul. This 'people will kick because the run is slightly suboptimal', is this a prevalent thing in NA?

edit: Furthermore, under what I would do to WHM, Banish would also be instantcast, so you wouldn't be able to tell someone's not using it unless you have ally spell effects turned on AND you're watching out specifically for it AND you're able to see the difference in VFX between the twinkly lights of Glare and the twinkly lights of Banish. Or you're using a 3rd party tool to check how many casts of each spell are being used. Either way, giving someone hassle for not using their kit as effectively as you expect them to is reportable under the TOS

[Rolder50]

This 'people will kick because the run is slightly suboptimal', is this a prevalent thing in NA?

It is not. The literal only time I have seen anyone get kicked from a roulette is because they are AFK/DCed. That's it.

[ForsakenRoe]

I will spare everyone the block of text

The question was "how in-depth would a healer rotation in Lapis Manilis have to be for you not to be bored?", and this meaning "running it for ~8-9 months".

And I answered. You might not like the answer, but it was given. I think that the changes to WHM that I have posted, almost a year ago now, would be enough to keep healing EX roulettes interesting to me, and also be casual-friendly enough that SE might actually implement them if anyone actually sent a copy across the design team's desks. Not much chance of that happening though.

I genuinely don't think anything that isn't a full on DPS rotation will meet that requirement, especially when we consider most of Lapis Manalis is AOE rotation burns, not even single-target rotations. Even most DPS AOE rotations are, what, around 5 abilities? Most have a 1-2 AOE combo with a third CD and a couple of oGCDs and a self-buff.

So, you want to talk AOE? How about this:

-Holy builds 2 'Nature Gauge' per mob hit. In an average wall-to-wall pull of, say, 7 mobs? That's 14 gauge per Holy cast.
-50 Gauge is used on BOTE, a 500p AOE heal. Helps keep the tank alive and is damage neutral
-BOTE then turns Glare/Banish/Dia into Quake, Flood, Tornado for one cast of each. Each of these abilities does more damage than Holy thanks to having 50% AOE falloff, and also build some gauge.
-Assize is still a 40s OGCD blast of damage.
-Solace/Rapture can be used to keep tank alive, and Misery refunds them.

Oops, with just two additional keybinds I've accidentally made an AOE rotation on WHM that involves as few as two buttons like we have now (Holy/Assize on CD), and as many as up to eight, should the player feel like partaking in said additional buttons. I guess that's like, five buttons too many for your liking?

You say it yourself though, AOE rotations even on DPS are not super complicated things. A lot of aspects of them can be skipped over if the player is not super confident with them. I don't remember to use Thunder 4 on the few times I play BLM for a dungeon run. Stuff still dies, and I still enjoy how satisfying and chunky Flare's damage feels. I've seen people forget to put up Death's Design on RPR. I've seen people forget Moulinet exists on RDM, instead using the single target combo in a pull of 7+. And of course, I've seen people just not do any AOE skills whatsoever, builder or spender (more common on SAM, it feels). Despite all of this, with regard to my own suboptimal gameplay I have never, in my 8+ years of playing, been yelled at. I don't do all of these though, only the Thunder one sometimes. I know what Death's Design is, honest (don't see why it needed both an ST and AOE applicator though)

DoTs are actually more complicated than SMN, so asking for a shorter/more frequent Dia would, actually, be more complicated than SMN. Just so we're clear on that. Again, "onebuttonmacro: The Job", remember?

/ac "Banish III"
/ac "Flood"
/ac "Glare III"
/ac "Quake"
/micon "Glare III"

Now you don't have to think about Banish being a thing, it automatically gets used on CD. And the people who want to have control over when it's used, because they enjoy optimizing their job, can do so. Everyone happy. Except you, because you have to press Dia 3 more times a minute

"But one healer will be left out!"

And? You'll get multiple options to play and not be bored. The only downside is if you specifically WANT other people to be unhappy by not having current healer gameplay exist. Which is not a good position to hold.

I have an alt. It only has SCH levelled to max right now. I only use it to help a friend reclear fights her static has farmed BIS from, so that she can be their 'taxi' into the later fights. Let's pretend that every healer gets changes and SCH is the one left behind. You're telling me I have to level a whole new job to max, or buy a boost for one, to partake in 'the higher level of fun that I desire and expect from my job'? I do not see how that's a solution.

I mean, serious question, would applying Dia 2-3 more times a minute REALLY make you running Lapis Manalis super fun and engaging to you? REALLY?

No. Not in isolation. But that's why it's not the only part of the suggested changes. Changing Dia to a 12s DOT on its own takes our Glare count from 18 per minute to 15. That's not much of a difference, and you're right, we'd be back to complaining within the week if that were the only change. But I didn't just ask for 'Dia to 12s pls', I listed several other small changes that, in a great display of 'greater than the sum of their parts', took the Glare count per minute down to 7 (or 8 if you count Quake as one too).

As an aside, I'll just quickly do the maths on what a 7mob AOE pull would look like for GCDs per minute, if you wanted to 'fully optimize everything'.

-Holy (+14 gauge per cast) x 11 (gives a total of 154 gauge)
-BOTE (-50 gauge per cast) x 3 (total cost of 150 gauge)
-Quake x 3
-Tornado x 3
-Flood x 3
-Solace/Misery x 3
-Misery x 1

Hmm. Maybe being able to do 2000p of healing (via BOTE) per minute in an AOE pull is a little excessive. Definitely would make you feel like a 'healer' though, cos that's a lot of 'healing' you'd be doing

edit: did the maths a bit wrong previously on the above AOE example. It now has 27 GCDs out of a possible 24 per minute, so I guess you'd have to choose which things to swap in/out as the fight progresses. EG, if the tank doesn't take much damage, you'd ditch the Solace/Misery loop. Or maybe they take a bit, and you use two Solaces on the first wall to wall, then one more and the Misery on the second wall to wall. And if you need tons of healing and need all of the Solaces right there, then you'd throw away Holy casts to be able to fit those Solaces in, as they're less damage than the other things

[Supersnow845]

I agree 100% coils healer DPS was by far the minority (and probably contributed the fights that actually did have hard enrages (like 6 or 11) just never physically seeing them being because you blew you them away; gordias forced raiders into that design philosophy but it didn’t really affect casual players at the time (especially with cleric stance as it was) SB marked the game wide movement of expectations to favour healers doing DPS at all levels of content