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

[Aravell]

Because it is an either-or situation. The misconception is from the people thinking it's not.

At the very least, with these Devs and this type of design, it's VERY unlikely they could pull something off that wasn't.

Except it's still not an either-or situation. The devs have proven that they can create a satisfying healing kit with good interactions, a satisfying dps kit with room for skill expression and good fight design that requires healers to heal, all this was done back in SB. We're asking for them to go back to that good balance of design instead of trying to push all the complexity into the mechanics dance itself, which is clearly not working because you only progress a fight once, after you clear, you now understand the fight to the point that most of the complexity is already gone. (Also, the more complex moving parts they put into a single mechanic, the more limited the solution becomes, but that's another problem entirely.)

SCH was gutted slightly going into SB, but it was still decently satisfying to play. AST was extremely weak at the start of SB, but they managed to tune it properly eventually and it felt good to play. The only healer that sucked was WHM.

[Zeastria]

Then healer isn't the role for you,
- playing the wrong role is boring...

I'm bored when i play dps..
but that doesn't mean/make dps jobs = bad.

[Gullis]

Then healer isn't the role for you,
- playing the wrong role is boring...

I'm bored when i play dps..
but that doesn't mean/make dps jobs = bad.

at least dps can play their roles. Im bored when I heal, because there is nothing to heal

[AmiableApkallu]

I'm bored when i play dps..
but that doesn't mean/make dps jobs = bad.

I think the point is that playing a healer is boring on its own merits – that between job design and encounter design and gearing, something is lacking. Which of those should change or be fixed, if any, is the question.

[caffe_macchiato]

I believe currently this is the most pressing issue in the entire game that needs to be addressed above everything else. That is my feedback.

You are right in saying it's the most pressing issue, not exclusively because of healers, but because the game design is fundamentally bad.

The only purpose of healing in FFXIV is to press a button every 30 seconds after a raid-wide. The reason there's a raid-wide every 30 seconds or so is because Square Enix unfortunately made healers exist 10 years ago and now have to find something to do with them. Because this is FFXIV, the engine is old, likely runs on punch cards, and SE can't design more interesting raids. This is their way of making it "interesting" in lieu of actual mechanics: every job category has a certain button to press at a fixed interval. That's your engagement. Small company, low revenue, not doing so well, etc.

If Yoshi-P wasn't a tired old man, he might consider making healers a buff/debuff class instead (a la FF13). That way healers can assist in damage and only need to manage contingency healing rather than raid-wides. Using buffs/debuffs means that every healer would do something different, allowing creativity. Naturally, this is Square Enix and Yoshi-P so that will never happen. 10 more years!

[Connor]

Uh, I’ve been asking for them repeatedly pls =(

Sorry, I don’t mean to make light of the sacrifices we’ve all made in the hopes of healers getting useful and interesting buff/debuff spells. We have all suffered at the hands of ffxiv healer design lol.

Just that in my perspective the ‘dps’ aspect of healers tends to come so far to the forefront that mentions of supportive playstyles tend to get buried.

Not that I have anything against healers having dps aspects, though personally I’d want to see them still be distinct from standard dps. I.E supportive dps abilities like debuffing enemies and/or synergy (not necessarily direct interaction) between healing/dps kits for certain jobs, gcd buffs increasing party member damage or defenses for indirect dps contributions, etc.

It’s funny though, devs say they don’t want healers to have dps abilities because it’d get in the way of healing, but then they pretend that buff/debuff support just doesn’t exist and isn’t a possible option. Even though, if people were somehow buffing/debuffing so much they literally didn’t heal (extremely unlikely lol just like dps’ing so much they don’t heal), they could put a base heal potency on support abilities to completely negate that issue. Doing the same with dps abilities would be more difficult because there’d need to be a Kardia-style damage converter for them to do the same - otherwise single target dps heals wouldn’t know where to go lol

Basically, devs pretend support doesn’t exist as an option even though it would be arguably even easier to slot them into the current healer playstyle than it would be to add more dps abilities (since you’d need to make further adjustments for them to fit in). In my opinion, anyway. And naturally, I don’t think that having a ‘support buff/debuff’ oriented approach to healers precludes them from being dps oriented. It would just mean shifting from ‘indirect dps contribution’ to ‘direct dps contribution’, which we essentially have the foundations of with Astrologian/Scholar and White Mage / Sage respectively

[ForsakenRoe]

We don't need much, just a couple of small, focused changes is enough to spice things up. For example, for the damage side of things, all I would ask for WHM is to reduce Dia's duration to 12s (because 30s feels stupid), and to add a new Water/Banish GCD with a 15s CD. That's all. That's not going to suddenly make WHM gigabrain to play, you could even make a macro to auto-use Banish if it's ready and Glare if it isn't, if you wanted.

As mentioned elsewhere, you never saw these 'healing is boring' complaints back in Stormblood when AST had it's old cards and SCH had it's DOTs. All we heard back then was 'can we make WHM as fun as SCH/AST and not have these trash Lily thingys', and SE heard that and went 'ok, we have reduced the fun of SCH/AST to achieve fun parity, enjoy' instead of just doing the SHB Lily fix to SB WHM and building on it from there

'More healing required' would be a more 'thematic to the role' solution. It'd also absolutely devastate the more casual players and likely cause an even bigger exodus from the role than we've seen. Abyssos ramped healing required, and we're in the situation we're in now. It got so bad that even JP started asking about the shortage

[Connor]

'More healing required' would be a more 'thematic to the role' solution. It'd also absolutely devastate the more casual players and likely cause an even bigger exodus from the role than we've seen. Abyssos ramped healing required, and we're in the situation we're in now. It got so bad that even JP started asking about the shortage

This is often brought up as the reason why healers exist as they do (‘new players can’t handle anything else’), but that kind of feels like a smokescreen to me lol. It assumes that the healers is literally the only job with any healing or support capability which simply isn’t true.

Like, if we take Lil Jimmy NoFriends as a new WHM into expert roulette. The tank itself is going to have various defensive / healing capabilities for both themselves and others. Melee dps have Feint and Second Wind, Red Mage and Summoner have the obvious healing capabilities, Bards can buff defense and healing amounts and Dancers have limited healing capabilities. Unless he’s going into a 4-man dungeon with a specific setup of 3 dps (which he’d have to intentionally opt into as a pre-made) - which are all melee - it’s doesn’t seem to accurate to me to say ‘he has to do everything healing related all by himself and it will not be possible because he lacks the required skill’.

Obviously I’m not advocating that literally all healers should be carried through content by tanks and dps, but at the same time, the ‘healers can’t need to heal more because newbies can’t handle it’ is predicated on the idea that nobody else can help them, which I personally don’t think is true outside of extremely specific circumstances

Addendum: rather than rewording the post (I didn’t realise how it looked until I re-read it lol) I just want to clarify that the ‘they’ making this argument is the devs themselves, rather than general community

[ForsakenRoe]

Obviously I’m not advocating that literally all healers should be carried through content by tanks and dps, but at the same time, the ‘healers can’t need to heal more because newbies can’t handle it’ is predicated on the idea that nobody else can help them, which I personally don’t think is true outside of extremely specific circumstances

Yes, I would also like to believe that by the time a player reaches EX roulette they would have enough skill to meet a slightly higher challenge than what is currently offered by the game. But some insist that adding more damage buttons to the healers would cause said players to be unable to keep up, and cause wipes. So, by that token, I would argue that not only would 'more healing required' also cause said players to be unable to keep up, them being unable to keep up would not be just 'oh they might not make the enrage timer and cause wipe' (what enrage timer in EX roulette, Cagnazzo charging his ult?), it would cause literal wipes because 'I could not keep people alive because I ran out of MP/I did not know my range limits/I mismanaged CDs earlier in the fight/whatever reason'.

And again, the point of a change that would 'solve the problem' is that it has to solve the problem in all content. It's no good if Savage requires more healing, but Ex roulette and 24mans are left alone to protect the casuals. Because then the problem still exists in those contents. A solution should be able to affect all content levels, and be impactful to those who need it's effect, and as ignoreable as possible for those who do not, or those who cannot perceive it's impact. So, slightly more involved damage rotation, potencies balanced such that Glarespamming is 90%+ of your total potential output. Those who want to go giga-sweaty in a 24man can, those who don't, can ignore it all. We've done the maths on how to make more interesting rotations, and balanced them such that 'Glarespam style' is less of a DPS loss to the design, than it's possible to lose thanks to crit variance right now. If random people on a forum for a 10year old MMO can manage to math a design like that out, SE sure should be able to

I didn't mention "complex dps rotation" with the intent to make a strawman. It's in the title of this very thread.

I know it's in the title, but we have to be careful with the phrase and the context surrounding it. 'Complex DPS rotation' and 'more complex DPS rotation' are two very different things, potentially. For example, if we were to have, on SCH:

Bio, 30s duration
Miasma, 24s duration
Shadowflare, 15s duration

That is 'more complex DPS rotation' than what we have now. But I doubt anyone would seriously call it a 'complex DPS rotation', only 'more complex than the current one'. Personally, all I'm asking for is one or two buttons on each healer. If that creates something that qualifies as a 'complex DPS rotation', then that's just sad, that such simple rotations would be considered 'actually complex' and not just 'more complex than current'

[ZephyrMenodora]

I'm bored when I heal because I need more complex healing