Quote Originally Posted by Tigore View Post
Some of us have been giving feedback towards freeing up those 2 - 3 slots that you say would need to be given up. The FF14 devs have tech to merge buttons together too so that the button changes to a better version or one that is catered to the situation. cough SMN cough. WHM has quite a selection of buttons that could arguably be merged together like Afflatus Solace with Cure 2 and Afflatus Rapture with Medica. 3 of the healers have a Cure version that can be merged with a Cure 2 equivalent. SCH would be Physick vs. Adloquium and AST would be Benefic vs. Benefic 2. One could say we could just drop Cure, but what if the Levelling roulette gives us Satasha? At least allow the Cure 2 to drop down to Cure for that dungeon. All of this so far frees up 3 slots for WHM and 1 for SCH and AST.

For SCH, freeing up more slots might involve consolidating some Aether cooldowns with the fairy cooldowns. It looks like the intentions were for Aether cooldowns to charge up the fairy gauge, but the fairy healing spell rewards feel quite paltry. This might feel like it will remove SCHs ability to stagger their heals if Indomidability is fused with Fey Blessing (example), but I tend to use both of them together anyhow in 4 man dungeons >.> From what the Savage healers comment on, the moments they actually need to heal tend to be in bursts that are predicted from boss cooldown timers. Bosses don't seem to do enough unavoidable AoE pulses to warrant wanting to separate and stagger the healing over multiple cooldowns. Even if we want to retain the staggered healing use, Fey Blessing could probably still be merged with Indomidability to be like an oGCD combo it flips to after using the first step.
Yeah, I've gone back to playing WHM over the weekend doing various content. I have no idea how they can make healers more proactive in fights. The entire design of the role in the trinity system is to react to the party taking damage or react to the threat of taking damage. Attacking is something that one does proactively and generally is something that is reacted to. So the main way to allow healers to be more proactive (DPS skill chains, etc), would be to have fewer points where the healers are forced to react (raise an ally, apply a heal OGCD or otherwise). The fights would need to have fewer points where it is "oh shit people are going to die" going from 100% to 10% HP from super attacks or unexpected loops of damage, such as when someone is learning savage, and move towards more gradual damage chains that are predictable but require attention. Another way to view it is instead of death being knife edge thrills it turns into gradual decay of ones health until they fall.

E.g. a boss does an aoe and hits the party. Everyone gets a debuff that if it stacks to 3 reduces everyones maximum HP by the damage dealt and can only be removed by using a healing spell or self heal skill. So instead of the fight being about healing people to max health after taking a huge hit, its about dpsing the boss and weaving in heals to remove the stacking debuffs and prevent permanent HP loss.