How would you solve the boring "damage rotation" of the healers?

[Vandso]

Surely giving them 1-2-3 combos isn't enough, they have too many buttons already. So to make them more interesting you would have to twist their skills a little bit. I don't play every healer so I can't give an opinion about all of them, but here's what I would do with the ones that I play:

Scholar

Energy Drain - Doesn't cost any Aetherflow. Instead it gives Aetherflow I, have 3 charges and 20 second cooldown.
Aetherflow - Restores 10% MP instead, costs 1 Aetherflow.

I basically swapped Energy Drain with Aetherflow. This would make you deal damage consistently without having to grief your party by spending all Aetherflow stacks in Energy Drain. That will be at the cost of a more inconsistent MP gain, and a more strategic use of your resources (but at least you're not spending every resource on damage).

White Mage

Stone and Glare are two separate GCDs instead of one being the upgrade of the other. Stone gives a stacking debuff to the targeted enemy that does nothing on it's own and can be stacked up to 5 times. Glare consumes this debuff and deals damage based on the amount of stacks. Dia also gives 1 stack per DoT tick. Using Glare on max stacks also speeds the Lily Gauge.

[Jeeqbit]

Scholar - replace Chain Stratagem with an off global attack. Once you use all your Energy Drains, it unlocks a one-off GCD to press so that it feels like you "worked towards" something.

Astrologian - bring back the concept of putting useless cards into Lord/Lady OR Royal Road. Either is fine, but both were similar in that they allowed you to do something else with useless cards and this was fun. More frequent cards like we had in 5.0 would be a bonus but I doubt they would do it. It was hard to juggle the constant cards being thrown at you in 5.0 but it was tons of fun and easily the most fun healer to play.

[VentVanitas]

literally just revert SCH's damage kit to how it was before Shadowbringers. it is the easiest and least intrusive way to make that specific job way more engaging.

[Avoidy]

Not sure. XIV has certain limitations that make it difficult. Here is how healing was handled in tera, though. For context, Tera's healers actually had to wait in queue to enter dungeons because so many people played the role and enjoyed it. When I played a tera private server after the game shut down, healing and tanking were actually really REALLY popular, and dps were the ones getting instant queues because so many more people just wanted to tank/heal. So, you can have a system where people love healing. Here is what they did for priest, which is the healer I mained. There was another one called mystic, and it played quite differently. By the time I quit, both were pretty viable for different reasons.

Anyway, here it is. Basically priests had a debuff they'd cast on the boss every 15 seconds or so iirc. This wasn't a dot, it was an actual debuff. It lowered the boss' defensive capabilities by like 10% or something, which let your whole group do way way way more damage and boosted everyone's parse/cleartime. It was expected of you to keep this up 100% of the time. Looking at logs after a fight, if your uptime on it was low, you would get called out for it since it was literally just pressing a button every 15 seconds. This was the tip of your responsibilities. Beyond that, you had party buffs to put out. One of them was called Energy Stars (estars for short) which did a whole bunch of stuff for your group but one that people loved was it lowered your party's CD on all of their skills by some percent, I don't remember anymore. Long story short, some classes actually had different rotations when they played with priests, because they were able to cram more into their opener. A lot of people preferred priests for this reason. Paired with a certain tank that increased the party's attack speed, the two were like a match made in heaven. If you had a lancer and a priest in your party, you could attack faster thanks to the lancer, and attack more often thanks to the priest. It was effing beautiful. But there's more. A priest was also the group's mana battery. You had a few mana regen skills and you used them off CD. Since every class relied on mana to attack, the difference between a good priest and a bad priest was that with a good priest you could complete your rotation; with a bad priest, you'd run out of mana and have to chug pots (which had a long cd and were not really ideal) to get through it. There was room for individual skill expression here. There were lancers who would only want to party with me, because other priests slacked on their mana and they couldn't keep going as hard as they would've liked. We'd regularly hear people say "I'll only go for a personal best if X is healing me" because of stuff like this, and it felt damn good. After all of this, there were other things like you'd have high potency attacks on long-ish CDs that you'd tap when they came off CD, but most importantly there weren't vuln stacks like in XIV. So if your team got hit by something, it didn't matter as long as they could recover from it. What this meant was a good priest could tell the group "just ignore the first point blank aoe, I'll heal you through it." Or there would be certain attacks that stunned, and you had an aoe esuna that you could tap and cleanse everyone at once. If you did this with good enough timing, it'd be like the stun never even occurred, but a bad priest would react slowly and people would just sit in the stun. That's skill expression. It was amazing. I had so many groups able to just ... ignore entire phases because I'd pump heals and cleanse their debuffs so fast that it was like it never even happened, and I actually got to feel like a supportive boon to my squad. And then we had skills like Sleep, except they actually mattered in hard fights; bosses would begin casting insta-wipe mechanics, and it was up to you to Sleep the boss and interrupt it.


Do you see how this is different from XIV? In XIV, you just press one button 95% of the time and the team can generally survive fine without you. There's no feeling that you matter at all. But to implement any good changes here would force players to actually rely on each other again. Or it might make people "anxious" about their performance, and we can't have that. God, just writing all this made me want to heal in tera. It's such a shame that tera died despite pushing the envelope on so many things, while this game doesn't even bother trying to innovate anymore and gets more and more players with each expac. I could talk about this for days. They did tanking better in that game too. If you're curious I could elaborate, but w/e

[ChrysOCE]

By not worrying about damage input from healers and have encounters actually require healers to focus and provide heal/mitigate/support, with healer DPS as a distant secondary concern? If I wanted an interesting DPS rotation, I would play DPS. When I play healer, I want to heal/mitigate/support.

[Mayhemmer]

By not worrying about damage input from healers and have encounters actually require healers to focus and provide heal/mitigate/support, with healer DPS as a distant secondary concern? If I wanted an interesting DPS rotation, I would play DPS. When I play healer, I want to heal/mitigate/support.

You're missing the point.

Most veteran healers will correct you in that the desire for a healers damage kit to be more involved than [> dot > filler > capstone skill >] is not "wanting to be a dps". It's wanting it to be more engaging.

Complexity of damage kit and complexity of healing kit are not a cemented binary choice, no matter how much Yoshi P or any other developer may try to say otherwise. There will always be moments in content that require more of one, and less of the other, at any given time, but there's no reason why one or both NEEDS to always be consistently dull.

[Canadane]

Go back to the SB skillsets.
But keep the ARR version of Cleric Stance.

[CidHeiral]

Holy Hand Grenades.

[ChrysOCE]

You're missing the point.

Most veteran healers will correct you in that the desire for a healers damage kit to be more involved than [> dot > filler > capstone skill >] is not "wanting to be a dps". It's wanting it to be more engaging.

Complexity of damage kit and complexity of healing kit are not a cemented binary choice, no matter how much Yoshi P or any other developer may try to say otherwise. There will always be moments in content that require more of one, and less of the other, at any given time, but there's no reason why one or both NEEDS to always be consistently dull.

And if the encounter design was better, healers wouldn't require a complex DPS rotation. We would be busy throughout the fight providing healing/mitigation/support. Instead, it's DPS..... heal in between.

[Nizzi]

And if the encounter design was better, healers wouldn't require a complex DPS rotation. We would be busy throughout the fight providing healing/mitigation/support. Instead, it's DPS..... heal in between.

Hmm, well I've done DSR on Scholar and that's a very pressing and busy fight that requires a lot of GCD shield casts, and the "simple DPS rotation" is still boring as sin, so...? It sounds to me like you just have an insanely unrealistic expectation of the amount of GCD healing this game should/could have.