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

[AmiableApkallu]

Let healers use their whole HEALER toolkit ! LET US USE OUR HEALS!!
I dont want to press x more meaningless/worthless dps buttons..

Downtime wouldnt exist if SE
actually could make fights depended on healing:

- More dmg during fights ( dot dmg/dispel-mech)
- More random unavoidable dmg..
- Remove self-heal/ress from other roles..

Instead of putting all that energy into asking for x more dps button.
How about fighting to get actually healer gameplay into picture instead!
People who enjoy healing.. do so because they enjoy the healing aspect of it..
not the **** 3 dps buttons we have!..

There will always be downtime. The time spent in an encounter can be split into two major categories. The first category:

1. Time spent on healing that's required by the encounter.

The second category:

2a. Time spent on healing to recover from people making mistakes.
2b. Time spent on dealing damage.

It is certainly possible to change job design and encounter design so that more time is spent on (1), required healing. And that would certainly take away from time that could be spent on (2b), DPS. However, it would also take away from time that could be spent on (2a), recovering from mistakes.

In roulette-level, story-mode content, there absolutely must be time available to spend on (2a), recovering from mistakes. Expecting perfect play at that level is exactly what will wall off players. At the same time, there will be parties that make fewer mistakes, or have better gear, so mistakes are more easily recovered from, meaning that we'll be able to shift time from (2a) to (2b), dealing damage.

[IDontPetLalas]

Exactly where did I say they couldn't have more? Point it out for me, please. My point is only that AST never had many damage buttons, not that they can never have any more. I personally wouldn't mind if we returned wholesale to SB AST where they had most of their engagement come from the card system, I'd wager most AST mains from back then wouldn't mind the 2 DoTs and 1 filler either.

Honestly, for how much you guys jump on Ren for drawing his own conclusions and putting words in your mouths, you're also doing the same thing to me right now.

"I doubt many would complain about having only 1 DoT and 1 nuke" My response was a direct reaction to this as was Ask. No one is "putting words in your mouth" , you may want to go back and read your post as this came directly from you.

[Connor]

It’s literally the same conversation people have been having since the game began (don’t think I don’t remember people asking for more dps buttons during Stormblood lol), but as I said before:

These ‘healers can get extra dps buttons without new healers ever needing to use them’ claims are all well and good, but try convincing the devs of that lol. Personally I don’t like the idea of ‘new ability defined by how much you can ignore it’ lol but that’s a different point entirely.
Wall of text below

To preface, I don’t personally care if healers get more dps - I tried to maximise Cleric Stance during ARR and HW, I tried maximise SCH DoT uptime during Stormblood including Miasma II. Hell I remember popping and dropping Cleric Stance during T5 just to reapply DoTs. Just because I have a differing opinion on what healers ‘can/should’ be doesn’t mean I’m completely ignorant of what they really are now. I’d like more buff and debuff / support gcd options for downtime but I also don’t expect the devs to ever actually do that, and I’m not going to ragequit the role if they get nothing but new dps and/or buttons either.

I’m just so tired of these arguments all being predicated on either ‘super sylphies’ ruining the game with their absolute refusal to do anything else but heal, heal, heal or ‘rampant green dps’ who just attack, attack, attack. Again, we’ve been having this conversation since ARR and Cleric Stance. I’ve literally met 2 actual Sylphies in the entire time I was playing, but idk apparently there’s so many they’re literally warping the game design to their own preferences. I’ve met the same amount of non-healing, pure dps healers who never use an oGCD (i.e barely any lol) because they just despise healing so much. Nothing to do with the devs just making unbelievably poor decisions lol, it was all Sylphie (who wasn’t even bitching about dealing dps she was bitching about communing and drawing aether from nature instead of herself, girl had a death wish not a parser fetish). Or Reverse Sylphie (‘I just want to dps, not those other things, you can’t make me!’).

Idk it just seems like every healer thread invariable devolves into a mud slinging contest. ‘You’re a SYLPHIE who HATES DPS and doesn’t do [insert specific high-level content]’, ‘You’re a GREEN DPS who wants nothing more than to stomp new healers into bloody pulps and make their lives hell’. And I’ll be the first to admit I’m guilty of it too. There’s too much scapegoating (‘strawmanning’? To use everyone’s favourite forum buzzword lol).
Sylphies are not ruining the game by wanting to heal more. Green dps are not ruining the game by wanting to dps more.

I also feel like there an aspect of ‘this is just how things are’ that needs to (but won’t) be considered lol. Maybe it’s just a ‘playtime length’ thing but I genuinely do not believe any player can ever convince the devs to do something they don’t want to do, regardless of how logical or statistically correct it is. I mean look at all the ‘Kaiten’ threads lol, if the devs could be convinced to make changes surely they’d have done so by now after one of the many, many, many posts about it (not making a judgement on the amount because I don’t play Samurai so have no idea what Kaiten even did lol). But there comes a point where you kind of have to accept ‘this is simply how things are’, because things will never change no matter how hard you try.

I’ve been there with Bard lol, criticising (whether it was called for or not is an entirely different story lol) pretty much everything they’ve ever done with it, since right back when they stopped letting them cast Cure, Protect and Stoneskin after the alpha (or maybe one of the betas). And look at it now - a hollow shell that really earned it place as one of the least played jobs in the game based on [observable website metrics] lol. That’s just what it is now, and I find it very unlikely it will change by next expansion. It’s simply how things are now that Bard is the ‘less support than dancer, less dps than MCH’ middle ground job…so I no longer main a Bard lol. It sucks and I low key have a burning hatred of the developers for all that they’ve done lol, but what use is there in screaming into the abyss and expecting it to call back, when it already gave its answer several years ago?

Addendum: there should be a rule against posting this much at one time. GM’s have mercy on me lol I didn’t realise how bad it was until the damage was already done lol

[Sebazy]

<snip>

I genuinely don’t think you appreciate what you’re asking for.

I’d recommend looking up healer POVs of O8S part 2 aka God Kefka. To this day that fight is still the biggest *healing* check we’ve ever had. AoEs were non stop and generally hit hard enough to kill without a mitigation plan and to compound things, the fight repeatedly had 1 HP > Hard Hitting AoE + Certain death debuff if people weren’t topped to full before the mechanic resolved. And these weren’t huge long 10-30 second casts. Heartless Arch Angel was pretty damn quick.

At the risk of sounding utterly condescending. I don’t think you could cope with it. I honestly don’t think you’d have any hope whatever tbh. I don’t mean that as an attack, It’s just how challenging the fight was for healers.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/e...iOIZwZUB3j/pub

And do you want to know the kicker? If it was released again as a new fight now, it still wouldn’t be enough to keep us healing the whole time. It wasn’t even enough back then by virtue that we needed the celestriad phases to get MP and cooldowns back for the following phases. Downtime is inevitable and unavoidable.

[Aravell]

"I doubt many would complain about having only 1 DoT and 1 nuke" My response was a direct reaction to this as was Ask. No one is "putting words in your mouth" , you may want to go back and read your post as this came directly from you.

And which part of that statement shows that I said they can't have any more damage actions? Please tell me how many hoops you had to jump through to get to the conclusion that I'm pushing for you and everyone else to accept the 1 DoT 1 nuke gameplay. You are attributing hidden reasonings and meanings to my words when I have already made clear, twice, exactly what I'm saying. That is the very definition of putting words in my mouth.

Let me reiterate for you, very clearly, what I'm saying, again. Because you clearly aren't reading what I'm saying. AST did not have a multitude of damage actions back in SB, many AST mains just want the old card system back, I doubt many would mind having only 1 DoT and 1 nuke if they get full engagement from the card system and surrounding systems again. Note that I said many, not most, not all, many. Read this time, thank you.

[ForsakenRoe]

Idk it just seems like every healer thread invariable devolves into a mud slinging contest. ‘You’re a SYLPHIE who HATES DPS and doesn’t do [insert specific high-level content]’, ‘You’re a GREEN DPS who wants nothing more than to stomp new healers into bloody pulps and make their lives hell’. And I’ll be the first to admit I’m guilty of it too. There’s too much scapegoating (‘strawmanning’? To use everyone’s favourite forum buzzword lol).
Sylphies are not ruining the game by wanting to heal more. Green dps are not ruining the game by wanting to dps more.

Addendum: there should be a rule against posting this much at one time. GM’s have mercy on me lol I didn’t realise how bad it was until the damage was already done lol

There is a balance to be struck, I think, and I do agree, having more healing required would feel more thematic to the role. But we've been given so many 'more healing' solutions (without enough of the 'problem' to require so many solutions) that the balance is already pre-skewed, and the 'more damage buttons' suggestion could be seen as trying to rebalance things, not shift it all the way to the opposite side. If we look at SB, once they had gotten rid of the clunky stuff like old Cleric Stance, we had some damage buttons, some healing buttons. We didn't have an obscene flood of different OGCDs to use. If we go back to HW, we had even less OGCD healing. AST, IIRC, had literally zero AOE OGCD healing options. It's not just a case of 'healing requirements haven't really increased', but also 'healing capability of players has absolutely skyrocketed over time'. I'd like to think that the 'ideal solution' would be like, more damage buttons, more healing required, but having the two halves of the kit (damage and healing) fit together more smoothly than what we have now. Lilies are a good example of what I'd like things to be like, you have to heal at some point, then later on you cash in a big refund of all the damage you lost in a satisfying blast that hits for like 80k. So I think like, why not the opposite, where you dealing damage gives you access to a big heal tool, and then that big heal also has a way to make itself damage neutral, so you flow between damage/healing/damage etc more seamlessly than the sudden 'handbrake applied' feeling of dropping everything to hardcast a Medica 2.

Also, you can put text in the tags [H*B] and [/H*B] (without the *s) and it'll make a 'click to show' box like if you want to hide a spoiler or whatever

like this

you can nest them inside one another too!

And do you want to know the kicker? If it was released again as a new fight now, it still wouldn’t be enough to keep us healing the whole time.

I do wonder how much of that fact is down to how many extra healing tools we have in the kit now. Like, Heartless took some Cure3 pumping to get through, but with Lilybell we could place and instantly detonate that for 1000p which is like, half the healthbar. Pneuma's 900 with Zoe. Those two alone would solve like 90% of the check and they're both zero damage lost. Heck, Plenary > Rapture's 600, even the fact that the lily system was dog doo bad back then is a factor compared to the kit we know now

[Astralrisk]

This is one of the main cruxes of the matter, I think. They said 'we didn't really know what to do with SCH' going into EW, and it got Expedience as a result. Now, Expedience is cool, but at the end of the day, it's main use is as a 10%, 20s mit that sticks as a buff to allies. This makes it a tool that fills a gap in SCH's kit, of 'mitigation that doesn't require standing in a specific location to partake' (like Soil demands of the team). But, by locking off 'more damage buttons' as a design choice, the devs paint themselves into a corner about what can be added. More healing tools will be superfluous and unrequired by 98% of the content in the game. More 'utilities' get suggested and shot down because they're either useful to the point of being pseudo-mandatory or 'pointless after prog' tools. So all SE can really add is just... more mitigation tools, and then make the 'hard content' encounters demand... more mitigation. So we end up in this spiral where raidwides in week 1 Savage are sometimes asking for, across the whole team, 30% plus shields to live through, because everyone and their mother can now provide mitigation of some kind.

I think this specifically is something that is felt across the whole game and not just Healers. but every role in general. Compared to mitigation before where it was mostly just a job for the healers and a couple of tank stuff, now it feels like every dps needs to contribute there mitigation in order to survive mechanics. Like Horrowing Hell from P10s is a good example, since you are effectively required to have mitigation from everyone in order to survive the mechanic. And SE has to do this, since they give everyone mitigation they either have to tune fights where its required so have to plan out the usage of it, or you don't plan around it and raid damage can just be reduced dramatically. I do think it's mostly tied to a healer issue like you said, but again it does feel like an issue that is apart of every job.

[Connor]

snip

Thanks lol, I’ve tried to clean up the post a little (at least as much as I can on mobile lol).

I do get what you mean; we have so many ultra powered healing abilities that there’s really no where to go other than down the ‘offensive / non-healing’ route. Not only that, but readjusting things so we did have to use all those healing abilities would be just as difficult / impossible due to all the rebalancing and adjustments that were needed, the pressure it’d put on new healer, etc.

I think you’re right as well about having damage feed into healing and vice-versa. I think it’d be better for both sides of the argument if we didn’t have this clear divide between ‘attack’ and ‘healing’ toolkits. If they both interacted and synergised in interesting ways it’d go far in making both healing and attacking more enjoyable, or at least I think it would lol. Especially for jobs like White Mage and Sage who already (well, in theory lol) have interaction between damage and healing. I also like the idea of healing being able to indirectly affect dps like the PvP version of Adloquium (damage buff). It gives ways for healers to still utilise their healing toolkits but in ways that can affect overall party dps, so there’s always the feeling of positive contribution. Plus it would make it easier to avoid running into an ‘energy drain’ situation where you have to choose between healing or damage, which I’m not a fan of personally - because, why not both lol

[Sebazy]

<snip>

Aye it's wild how polarising this whole discussion is. There's too much framing of everything as a purely black or white solution when the reality is that we need a bit of everything to truly get healing out of the hole SE have spent the last bunch of years digging.

Our kits need to be pruned, streamlined and rethought
We need more to heal
We need more to do for those inevitable periods when there isn't the heal

Throwing more huge 2 minute heal bomb capstones at us isn't the answer
Throwing huge bleed bombs on everything isn't the answer
Throwing full bore dps rotations isn't the answer

We need a hearty sprinkling from all 3 departments++

And for that to happen, IMO Yoshida/SE's financing department needs to get their wallets out and start hiring.

[ASkellington]

snip

BOTH sides need to change. Which one comes first I don't care. They can increase the healing parts of the game; its not going to stop me complaining that outside of group content DPS on healers is abysmal, uninspired and still needs to change. Especially because you and I both know they aren't going to increase the requirements enough so that we don't have any down time. Its LITERALLY not possible. Even with a smaller healing kit.



Misery is a semi-Aoe likely so that it can be used for both single target AND AOE target use. Which I don't really care for either (along with other semi-aoes because if you're going to make it do 50% less damage to everyone other than the primary target wtf is the point of it?) but until they make an AOE version (which why not SE?) I'm not going to die on that hill. I equate it more to a single target ability more than anything.


I did give it consideration. I don't agree with your reasonings and told you why. Historically WHM used more holy or Light themes in previous games. That's fine. In this game however they used Aero and Stone. Stoneskin. More elemental themed abilities. While going into Shb changed WHM to be more in line with previous iterations of itself it destroyed what it was in this game. This is what I have issue with. But I'll stick with just Holy being apart of the rotation and not get back into that debate.

Holy does not need to be more prevalent in WHM's kit. It can stay as it is as a reference to its previous incarnations. We now have Glare and Dia to support it and I'd argue the lily system as well. Giving back Stone/Aero and/or a new water damaging or support ability back to WHM both fixes the problem that mains had with the switch to Dia and Glare as well as gives WHM more to maintain. And I would prefer it over putting Holy into the rotation.

Because Holy does not equal Misery or even RDM's post melee spells. Holy being introduce into the rotation would be the same as doing Malefic into Gravity. Or using Jolt and then instead of Veraero III you use Veraero II, on a single target. The damage would be fixed (because it wouldn't be the same as if you just randomly hit it), but its just as tone deaf. I'd rather not have it.