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

[Payadopa]

Spreadsheet warriors asked for this, so SE obliged them. We used to have more support, more job synergy more Individuality but then someone broke out a calculator, declared a certain job combination suboptimal and a few years later this is the result. Blissful uniformity.
People also bitched about melee uptime so SE made bosses bigger.
Honestly, I don't envy them. No wonder they stopped replying in the EN forums years ago. lol

[Kacho_Nacho]

I understand that and I agree with you. I wish SE could revamp and rework our healing toolkit as a whole and make healing/support aspect of the toolkit more interactive and interesting.

I know it's very unlikely for SE to do so, but the same could be said about the request for more dps options. According to healer subforums, they have been asking for more dps options for years. It didn't get us anywhere. If anything, the statement from Yoshi-P during the Endwalker interview only enforced his stance of "no dps for healers"

I'm not averse to more dps buttons for healers though. I just prefer having a gameply that focus more on utility and healing to doing dps.





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

Yes, our healing toolkits are bloated. To make matters worse, non healer roles are also capable of contributing lots of healing.





Yes, more support GCDs. New skills, regardless of healing or dps, coming in the form of oGCD still results in 11111 gameplay.

Well said! This is my position as well. Healers don't need more damage spells nor a dramatically raised skill floor.

They need more interesting toolkits. I feel the best option is to remove most of the heal & buff abilities from tanks & damage dealers then give the best ones to healers as abilities. Overhaul everything!

To cut down on bloat, a lot of heals can be & should be combined/removed because their function is exactly the same. For example, do white mages really need three buttons for Cure III, Medica, and Medica II? These spells should evolve into new spells as they level, just like Stone did.

Spreadsheet warriors asked for this, so SE obliged them. We used to have more support, more job synergy more Individuality but then someone broke out a calculator, declared a certain job combination suboptimal and a few years later this is the result. Blissful uniformity.
People also bitched about melee uptime so SE made bosses bigger.
Honestly, I don't envy them. No wonder they stopped replying in the EN forums years ago. lol

This is not a helpful post & is a strawman argument.

It cannot be claimed that Square Enix listens to its customer base too much and not at all. Everything about the current state of healing can be laid exclusively on confirmation bias on the part of the development team. They made assumptions about healers early on and are sticking to that idea. It's very hard to change the opinion of a person when they are convinced they are right.

[SieyaM]

What I can see happening, which is a concern I've voiced before, about adding an actual rotation or burst phase to healers is that healers will be encouraged to not heal if it will interrupt the rotation or burst phase. No matter how dire the situation you will either be healed at the end of a rotation when it won't interrupt other abilities they use for DPS or not at all during a burst phase so they don't waste GCD or oGCDs if they have them for dps during that time.

[ASkellington]

What I can see happening, which is a concern I've voiced before, about adding an actual rotation or burst phase to healers is that healers will be encouraged to not heal if it will interrupt the rotation or burst phase. No matter how dire the situation you will either be healed at the end of a rotation when it won't interrupt other abilities they use for DPS or not at all during a burst phase so they don't waste GCD or oGCDs if they have them for dps during that time.

They quite literally made tanks' 123 combo no longer able to be broken by their ranged GCD aggro attack and most of the healers heal on the oGCD where they can weave their combo. This holds no water.

Also, whoever said that a healer's rotation would look akin to a tank/melee dps? They can have debuffs that do damage on a 15s recast timer, extra DoTs to add on (which are press and forget btw), delayed damaging abilities akin to Earthly Star, or some combination of the above.

Any healer worth their salt is going to heal when they need to. What that looks like is going to be different depending on the healer, their team, the fight, and their gear. I may stop my rotation because I feel I need to heal half way through the 15s of the 2min window another healer may say, "no, you can wait" and be just as right as I cause they know you aren't going to die in 15s.

Neither of these responses are justification for not giving us extra dps.

[SieyaM]

They quite literally made tanks' 123 combo no longer able to be broken by their ranged GCD aggro attack and most of the healers heal on the oGCD where they can weave their combo. This holds no water.

Also, whoever said that a healer's rotation would look akin to a tank/melee dps? They can have debuffs that do damage on a 15s recast timer, extra DoTs to add on (which are press and forget btw), delayed damaging abilities akin to Earthly Star, or some combination of the above.

Any healer worth their salt is going to heal when they need to. What that looks like is going to be different depending on the healer, their team, the fight, and their gear. I may stop my rotation because I feel I need to heal half way through the 15s of the 2min window another healer may say, "no, you can wait" and be just as right as I cause they know you aren't going to die in 15s.

Neither of these responses are justification for not giving us extra dps.

As for adding extra DoTs, unless they have fixed the hard limit of effects that are allowed on a player or npc that will not happen. It is a pretty high limit and hard to hit in most content, but it has hindered performance before and no one wants to be stuck in a situation where their kit is being locked out because they can't get an effect to land on an enemy. There is already a school of healing that is a very small group but still believes that if you take damage that is avoidable you aren't going to be healed because it will take away from their DPS uptime. You have to play perfectly in all content at all times because if you don't then you're effecting healer DPS and that is inexcusable. They can easily make a small rotation that healing wont interrupt but I have a feeling even then people would be right back here complaining about how simple it is.

[Aravell]

What I can see happening, which is a concern I've voiced before, about adding an actual rotation or burst phase to healers is that healers will be encouraged to not heal if it will interrupt the rotation or burst phase. No matter how dire the situation you will either be healed at the end of a rotation when it won't interrupt other abilities they use for DPS or not at all during a burst phase so they don't waste GCD or oGCDs if they have them for dps during that time.

If a healer doesn't heal when required, they are a bad healer, it really is that simple. Whether or not healers have more damage spells or not, if someone is not healing when needed, they are bad. Also, no one is asking for a 20s long double Enshroud window on a healer or a 20s long No Mercy burst window, healers by nature are flexible, you don't need to keep 100% dps uptime or not have enough gauge for the next burst.

[vetch]

If a healer doesn't heal when required, they are a bad healer, it really is that simple. Whether or not healers have more damage spells or not, if someone is not healing when needed, they are bad. Also, no one is asking for a 20s long double Enshroud window on a healer or a 20s long No Mercy burst window, healers by nature are flexible, you don't need to keep 100% dps uptime or not have enough gauge for the next burst.

Healers already do have a 'burst window'; it's exactly as long as their group's raidbuffs are up and they try to fit as many damage GCDs & oGCDs as they can into it. Same as every other job under the current boring game design. Any incoming damage during that window that can't just wait until buffs fall off is getting an oGCD heal that doesn't interrupt the DPS 'rotation'.

[Teno]

Come on, some comments in this thread are ridiculous.

"Play a dps if you want to dps".

Please refrain from spouting bs when you are clueless.

Healers have been green dps since ARR, end of the line. Their gameplay has considerably worsened since pretty much SB. ShB rubbed salt in the wound and let's not talk about the spit in the face that was EW.

Now, not everything is grim and healers are again in a very good state but... only in pvp, where they mostly focus on burst/support (and cc but kinda irrelevant) with heals on a cd. In fact, if they could do away with their s*** pve constraints and bring over some of the pvp things they've added to pve, the game would be immensely more fun.

[LilimoLimomo]

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

My gut reaction was that there are DPS classes for that. But I think that was the myopic, reactionary response.

A more thoughtful reaction would be: why not? Just as DPS jobs offer both SMN (simple) and BLM (complex), maybe there should be a single healer job that adds that complexity for players who want something more involved to diddle with between heals.

[AmiableApkallu]

A more thoughtful reaction would be: why not? Just as DPS jobs offer both SMN (simple) and BLM (complex), maybe there should be a single healer job that adds that complexity for players who want something more involved to diddle with between heals.

Why not all of the healers? To quote from another thread:

So instead, a simple, yet focused 2 or 3 changes to each healer's damage rotation, balanced in such a way that ignoring the new additions is a smaller potency loss than something like 'ignoring your DOT' is right now, is what to look into, I think. If someone is skilled enough to use the new rotation, they can. If they are not, they can ignore parts of it until they get more comfortable with the job and start to throw in more and more of the rotation. Nobody is going to cause a wipe in Lapis Manalis because they could not work out how to effectively use their new Miasma DOT on SCH.

After all, if you're worried about keeping a healer "simple" or "accessible", what you need to worry about is the healing kit, not the DPS kit:

All it takes to keep WHM as the easy and accessible healer is to maintain its core healing skills as "restore 'lots' of HP after damage hits" and to make those skills available on demand. Which is to say, all it takes is to leave the Lv.50 healing kit (Cure, Medica, Regen) well enough alone. It's an intuitive model of healing that works well as long as single hits don't delete entire HP bars.

The DPS kit could be a tangled mess that'd give optimizers a run for their money, but so long as it's obvious how to do the "healer" part of a job that's called "healer," it'd be fair to say that the job is easy and accessible.