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

[AmiableApkallu]

It's easy to say 'here's how to fix the problem' but it's a butterfly effect of extra knock-on issues that get raised that also have to be factored in and removed or minimized, and no matter how it gets sliced, I can't see how 'more healing needed' results in an overall smaller devtime cost than 'add more damage buttons'

I think there's a simpler way to look at this whole "more healing needed" thing. The one thing SE cannot modify in any way, shape, or form is time. So, we ask ourselves:

1. What fraction of every minute do you expect a healer to keep the GCD rolling?

2. Of the GCDs that healer is casting, what fraction is required by mechanics, and what fraction is available to help the party recover from mistakes?

Here's one possible scenario, which I'm aiming "casuals" and "normal content": We expect a healer to have a 75% GCD uptime. We expect 2 out of every 3 GCDs to be devoted to healing the encounter's mechanics, leaving 1 out of every 3 GCDs available to help the party recover from mistakes. Do the math, and that's only 30 seconds out of every minute that's spent on "required" healing. If I happen to be an S-tier healer with perfect GCD uptime in an S-tier party that never makes a single mistake, what exactly am I supposed to do for the other 30 seconds every minute?

That's the problem. How do you answer those questions such that normal content is clearable by casuals without also giving the S-tier folk large chunks of time for DPS?

[Shurrikhan]

I think there's a simpler way to look at this whole "more healing needed" thing. The one thing SE cannot modify in any way, shape, or form is time. So, we ask ourselves:

1. What fraction of every minute do you expect a healer to keep the GCD rolling?

2. Of the GCDs that healer is casting, what fraction is required by mechanics, and what fraction is available to help the party recover from mistakes?

Here's one possible scenario, which I'm aiming "casuals" and "normal content": We expect a healer to have a 75% GCD uptime. We expect 2 out of every 3 GCDs to be devoted to healing the encounter's mechanics, leaving 1 out of every 3 GCDs available to help the party recover from mistakes. Do the math, and that's only 30 seconds out of every minute that's spent on "required" healing. If I happen to be an S-tier healer with perfect GCD uptime in an S-tier party that never makes a single mistake, what exactly am I supposed to do for the other 30 seconds every minute?

That's the problem. How do you answer those questions such that normal content is clearable by casuals without also giving the S-tier folk large chunks of time for DPS?

This is a wonderfully sensible way to look at this, though I do feel that by lv90 we should be able to expect more than 75% GCD uptime and be okay with less than a whopping 33% over-time error margin, even in casual content. Even this understanding would likely allow us to push required healing to up to two-thirds of GCDs if we wanted to; we needn't baby our healers quite so much.

That said, I do of course agree that we should have more involved downtime activities available to us. That much should happen, imo, even if we spent 80% of GCDs healing in some content.

[LilimoLimomo]

whoops, wrong thread!