1: The statement that 'you could double healing required and still clear dungeons with Medica 2 spam' is more an indictment of the currently obscenely low requirements than anything. It also only applies to the dungeon bosses, not the whole dungeon. If you'd like to try to run an EX roulette without using anything other than Medica 2, good luck. Don't forget to bring Ethers, spending 1000 MP per GCD is going to leave you OOM in like 30s
1b: If the additional potency gained by doing the 'correct rotation' is not factored into the balance, then yes it is optional. As previously mentioned, if a new 350p GCD skill was added to WHM today, then the balance of 'what DPS is expected from the WHM' would not change. Originally, the fights were designed assuming the WHM would be using Glare at that GCD, now it's a skill that is 40p stronger. The DPS checks as they currently stand would get easier to meet if you're doing the 'optimal rotation' and equal if you just spam Glare like currently. It's on SE to make those potency differences low enough to not affect the DPS checks too hard, and to keep the DPS checks more lenient in content where there is checks, so that the healer players have room to spare GCD healing/raising if needed. Though, this has been mentioned so many times before, I have to assume at this point that you're willfully ignoring anything that speaks to the matter
2a: If the party wipes because the healer did not deal enough damage, there's bigger issues than the healer not doing damage. What you're looking at as 'suboptimal gameplay by healer that leads to wipe' is something like, not refreshing the DOT when it needs to be refreshed. Or not using a damage GCD the moment it's up. But with how the DPS checks are balanced, the 'suboptimal gameplay that leads to wipe' is more akin to 'the healer is dealing literally zero damage, be it because they're spamming overhealing or they're just AFK'. It is, as previously mentioned, more damage loss to ignore your DOT as a healer now, than it would be to ignore the new button in some of my proposals. But somehow I'm the one who'd be causing wipes to enrages, not SE and their insistence on cramming so much of our potency into a non-interactive, not-interesting, bland 'once per 30s' DOT that we press and forget. 1430p a minute would be lost if you ignored Dia entirely. 1430p from TWO GCDs PER MINUTE it's crazy
2b: It's more damage to do Garuda-Titan-Ifrit on SMN. But if there's a long movement phase (Akanthai Act 4) during the Ifrit section, we can change that to put Ifrit first, and then use Garuda and Titan for movement, at the small cost of 'now Ifrit is the one in buffs, but we gain damage because we can actually cast while doing the mechanic'. Is that not 'an option', because things are so binary that we can only look through the lens of 'this is optimal' or 'this is suboptimal'? Holding the 350p instantcast GCD for 2 more Glares is suboptimal, it might push one off the end of the fight and lose you a use (and therefore 40p). But by doing so, maybe you keep a GCD that you'd otherwise lose to movement for a mechanic, thereby preserving the 310p you'd have lost there. Damage rotation decisions have more going on than 'this is/is not optimal'
3: You should be aware, being as you're able to play 3 instruments, that certain basic tenets of a discipline carry over, regardless of the nuances of the individual thing. For example, playing piano, saxophone and guitar all have completely different methods to play in terms of what you do with your hands, or how one requires your feet, one requires using your lungs etc. But they all have the shared basics of 'sense of rhythm' or 'you can read sheet music'. Anyone who is good at a role in the game will have 'raid awareness' such that they can do fight mechanics on any role (we don't suddenly forget how to do stack markers because we changed from healer to DPS for this EX roulette, do we), and with them being able to 'autopilot' mechanics in that way, that frees up more mental load for them to focus on their role's duty, eg healing as a healer. You could say that 'some people just don't have the brain for healing' like I don't have the brain for DPS. And that's fair, to an extent, but I've never put effort into trying to learn a DPS so I wouldn't know for sure if that were the case. It might be that these players you speak of who are never going to be good at healing, are only such because they try it a couple of times, decide it's not for them and give up on trying to learn the role. Anecdotally, a friend of mine hates playing tank or healer. He's a DPS main through and through, and in WOW, specifically a Ret Paladin main. Doesn't like any other class as much as Paladin. Still managed to learn Sage in time for Asphodelos Savage, and that's also factoring in that he did the EW story as PLD. You might be overestimating how long it takes to learn to play a healer in this game
4: lol and also lmao. The 'Green DPS healers' is not one group, but two. There's the ones who will sac the whole party for the sake of one more Glare, who refuse to heal for any reason and would rather wipe to something really simple than use a GCD heal (I've met a guy who refused to drop Soil for something because he demanded and expected, in a PF run no less, Tactroubasamba from the ranged for that specific raidwide). Those are the players who muddy the waters of the discussion, thankfully they're quite few and far between. The other group is the much larger population of the 'Green DPS', those who try to do as much damage as possible to help the team kill the boss faster, but are completely fine with using a GCD heal as backup if they need one. SCHs already do this with Deployment Tactics so they should be no stranger to it, but I'm an example of the latter group too. I'll try and 'be optimal' for a few pulls for reclears, but after a few wipes I get tired of tryharding and just GCD wherever I have to to get the clear. Again, my logs are public, you can see my P12S runs, and how often I say 'screw it' and use Medica 2, or Asp.Helios in the few times I've started going as AST. The 'parse obsessed' subset of the Green DPS are as much a detriment to the party's success chances as a healer that refuses to use a single damage skill. But somehow, one's 'an affront to the holy trinity design' and one's 'doing their role'
5: It's the opposite, unsurprisingly. Having OGCDs to weave means that healing checks can have more design space, not less. If we deleted every OGCD we have, forcing every heal check to be dealt with via GCDs, then we've got two options. A single target heal check (multihit tankbusters), and AOE heal check (raidwide/stackmark like Styx). And we have two tools to solve them, ST heal GCD and AOE heal GCD. Furthermore, we're hard capped by the potency of those GCDs. We cannot have a heal check that stresses the players any harder than around '500p per GCD', because you cannot guarantee which healer would be tackling it, and while WHM's Cure3 goes to 600, you can't know that it'd be a WHM doing the fight. So basically, every heal check would boil down to either 'spam Medica' or 'spam Cure2 on targetted player'. Almost zero design space. Any additional 'design space' that is useable with 'only GCDs' is not exclusively the domain of 'only GCDs'. For example, if the boss autoattacks both tanks, plus one random player (or, the closest player, for Thordan in DSR as an example), then while it would be a more interesting 'heal check' than the aforementioned two, it also doesn't suddenly stop functioning as a heal check if there's OGCDs to use. It just means that OGCDs are a valid alternative solution to the fight
Originally Posted by Aravell
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