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

[ty_taurus]

Adding more to the point: there will always be some subset of players who just won't improve no matter what changes you do to the role. There's no point in making those healers 'heal better' because their next likely course of action is to quit the role instead of improving, something that's seen as a cardinal sin to the eyes of the job devs.

Coincidentally, these are also usually the same subset of players who don't even touch their dry, barebone today's dps spells. What makes you think having more of them suddenly mean they will start paying attention to these and forget about healing? The answer? They won't. They're already shaking to even press the proper healing button and you want to make lives harder for them?

The "Shitter" player archetype (Misshapen Chair's description, not mine).

[Fellgon]

I found this video of youtube interesting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py0xhKxDEIo

[Maltothoris]

I found this video of youtube interesting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py0xhKxDEIo

Well look at some of the comments in that video

My big gripe, however, is with the healer jobs more so than any other group. Back when 2.0 began, I LOVED to play SCH because it was entirely unique in being a healer that can do active damage with DoT spells while keeping their focus on healing allies. The job evolved and became better with each change to its balance for years. I don’t exactly remember when it happened, possibly Shadowbringers, but they took away some of our toolkit and refined the job down to being more healing focused and all of our fun damaging kit was severely crippled, primarily from the removal of a key ability: Bane. Bane would spread our multiple DoT spells to all enemies within a fair sized radius. I did in fact level other healer jobs alongside SCH and liked how they differed despite the basic concept being the same. WHM had some neat dedicated healer abilities and lacked a lot of the damaging utilities that SCH and AST had. AST had a really novel and unique ability to swap between the type of healer needed the most between fights. Each job felt different while all basically being the same: a healer. Well, by the time I had finally memorized the cards and their different utilities on AST, they were changed. Then again. Now they’re an afterthought because it plays almost exactly like WHM does now and the cards aren’t as important to the job’s identity. SCH has approximately 4 damaging abilities now: Broil, Art of War, Energy Drain and Biosys. We went from having 3-4 DoTs we could apply at a time and could spread to other enemies to just one that we cannot and have to manually cycle through enemies. We have an AoE damage spell that is fairly weak and is short-range so we need to be in the middle of the danger to even use it. Then we have two long range damage spells where one costs a charge of a limited resource and doesn’t do enough to justify the use unless you are actually in excess of this resource. All four healer jobs have access to these basic spells, each with a different name and slightly different function.

Well, Healers have been asking for changes to their gameplay for ages by now. If there is one part of the community that currently feels ignored, no matter if hardcore, midcore or softcore, it is healers and the curse of the far too powerful OGCD healing and the 1-button spam that is their dps "roation". And they have no excuses there. They have been getting feedback a lot. Hundreds of pages and forum posts on their official forums in all languages.

The problem for me (as non-hardcore player) is when they began making Tank jobs so similar to eachother I felt like I was playing "Tank" role but PLD/WAR/GNB/DRK was just a different skin over layed on top. Healers also felt similar in that they tried to make healers more "attractive" by making them way simpler to manage but then they sucked all the fun (for me anyway) in managing healing cooldowns since well there are a dozen off GCD heals and only a single button for DPS. So now the GCD heal is pretty much dead and well the GCD doesnt matter because you have so many oGCD heal buttons. I stopped FFXIV after 6.2 and after playing since 2,0 I felt like I had reached the end of the storyline and I was no longer interested in the new story direction. Dawntrail I thought might excite me again but so far i'm yet to be convinced.

From the perspective of someone who joined around the end of HW and was spared the chaos that was raiding at the time, healers really did get homogenized way too much. I believe they tried to compensate for this discrepancy by adding more outgoing damage to the party in Endwalker raids, but the role engagement still feels boring.

The 2 minute/1minute burst cycle has never entirely bothered me either, it's just that it's not engaging enough for healers. I don't like using the "ultimate cleared with only tanks and dps" example because it's a niche case, but what does it say about the identity of a role that isn't needed for the toughest content if you're coordinated enough?

Aside from the fact that we lost some DoT management outside of the 1 button, our damage buffs only revolve around flat dmg up and crit now. It feels...flat. I'm not saying bring back SB Ewer/Spire, but having some form of Haste would be nice. That is, if they aren't going to rework materia melding, there's no reason to meld anything other than crit if you're missing it.

I understand them nerfing Astro because it was straight up OP for 2 expansions, but now it's just not engaging enough.

I want the jobs to be fun and I want them to be powerful, however I don't want them to require everyone to suffer weird timers and wonky buffs.

Idk I like some homogenous nature in our jobs bc all ranged should have freedom of movement, all casters should be powerful and sling spells, all melee should be formidable, all tanks should be reliable, and all healers should be interesting.

This is done best by having certain 123s that every general job has like heslers have a single heal, aoe heal, attack, and dot with a raise. That is fine. Its what comes after that is what can make them more interesting, like old scholar with shadowflare or aero 3 and aero 2 comboed from whm. They were removed though bc they shifted power from the other healers to them via dps/buffs.

Astro had a unique effect for each card and the damage, mp, crit, skill speed, and defense cards were all amazingly reliable and fun to use! It was also harder to handle so they took jt away. I always considered that to be a needless change but the current system is also useful so I have to pine for the past.

My point is that things can be interesting with some homogenization but the jobs still need to be fun and different or it wont be good for the game overall.

And there are so many other comments like these as well on that same vid.