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

[Nizzi]

The big white elephant in the room is we healers have been spoiled by the ease of the content, the potencies of our heals, the MSQ, and all the other challenges presented to us by Square Enix. That needs to be addressed before anyone starts changing healer damage rotations.

Can I just ask you something, respectfully - what is the highest level of content difficulty you're talking about and doing? Are you claiming that Savage and Ultimate are easy for healers?

[Kacho_Nacho]

In part, yes. Why not?

If you change the tuning such that, say, we spend as much time healing then as we do dealing damage now, that's going to be outright oppressive to your less skilled healers and, by extension, their parties. If we go back to even just Stormblood levels of relative healing requirements, well, we also had more involved damage-dealing back then.

Shouldn't less skilled players be given a reason and opportunity to improve? It isn't engaging to go through content mindlessly. Players only stay with a game if it hooks them in some way emotionally.

Also, is it fair for Square Enix to balance healers around the lowest denominator? If they continue to do that then FFXIV will continue to lose veteran healers, because they're bored, leaving only the least skilled.

from Healers while increasing attack potencies by at least that 30% in compensation), but there's no reason not to also add (back) new/returned offensive skills at the same time; we were plenty able to handle them back even in the most intensive eras of healing requirements and, to most, they felt good to use.

Totally agree.

Can I just ask you something, respectfully - what is the highest level of content difficulty you're talking about and doing? Are you claiming that Savage and Ultimate are easy for healers?

I'm saying everything up to that point was too easy. Healers weren't prepared for the sudden leap in difficulty. Difficulty should be a steady slope instead of big steps up, if you know what I mean.

[Shurrikhan]

Shouldn't less skilled players be given a reason and opportunity to improve? It isn't engaging to go through content mindlessly. Players only stay with a game if it hooks them in some way emotionally.

Also, is it fair for Square Enix to balance healers around the lowest denominator? If they continue to do that then FFXIV will continue to lose veteran healers, because they're bored, leaving only the least skilled.

A 10-14x increase in GCD healing required (flipping the portions of uptime spent healing and portion spent attacking) is hardly a small and manageable shift. You already saw my suggestion, ultimately about a 25% nerf to outgoing healing (with small accordant changes), which would be itself a huge increase to GCD healing required because the largest factor forgoing the need for GCD healing right now is simply how much is provided for "free" via oGCDs.

Let's not pretend that anything / everything short of a n absurdly extreme or "nuclear" option (more healing requirements than we've ever had before, just to balance out having the least engaging downtime activities we've ever had) is no change at all...

[Sebazy]

I'm saying everything up to that point was too easy. Healers weren't prepared for the sudden leap in difficulty. Difficulty should be a steady slope instead of big steps up, if you know what I mean.

This is a big part of the puzzle for sure. For all it's jank, one thing 2.0 ARR absolutely nailed right out of the gate was it's progressive difficulty curve that steadily ramped up as you progressed through dungeons into the HM Primals and onto Coil. They even used to dungeons to introduce people to key primal mechanics. Genius design IMO.

One part I will disagree with you on though, it's not always possible to have constant healing requirements throughout the fight. Even Godka had some downtime (We needed it to get MP back). I do agree that a rethink on healing requirements and incoming damage is a central piece of the puzzle if at least to eliminate the chances of us getting another Byregot or E8S, but giving us something to do during downtime and solo content should still be a consideration IMO. It doesn't have to be DPS, buffing/augments gets the thumbs up from me++