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

[Renathras]

The problem is...

Oh, I just saw what you posted above.

These assume Broil 5 is a thing, and that it is 300p (names WIP).

Biolysisis: 30s duration, 35p per tick (total 350p)
Mias-malady: 1.5s cast time, 24s duration, 100p on cast, 30p per tick (total 340p)
Shadowflare: Instantcast, 100p AOE centered on enemy. Drops a puddle under enemy for 15s (limit of one puddle), 50p per tick. Total 350p per enemy. Due to numbers, it's a gain to upkeep in AOE, instead of just using AOW.

Didn't see anything about Quickened Aetherflow there. Setting that aside:

Ruin 2 being Miasma here shouldn't be a problem as it...would be literally the same thing with the same use case. Swaping the cast time for instant and making the potency more on the initial damage preserve's Ruin 2's current use, but the DoT now gives you a judgement call on if you might choose to shift the refresh to accommodate movement and a priority system of whether you should use Bio, Miasma/Ruin, or Swiftcast for movement, depending on the situation. It still has the 24 sec refresh for optimal use, so that's no different, yes? That still allows the same "downtime filler".

Likewise, replacing Energy Drain with Shadowflare would do the same thing, pacing out damage more than making it a "dump all in burst" situation and actually requiring more thought to use. The other problem is SCH is the healer with the most button bloat issues, so what will you remove to add new buttons?

Though I'm more in the line of general complexity, I don't think Ruin 2 having a DoT is too terribly more difficult and it retaining its current use...that just seems like a good addition to me.

The first thing I saw for SGE is changing the MP costs of everything...which sounds like a pretty significant change..?

I'm talking both heals and DPS...

I guess my thinking on this is that WHM isn't about "big slow turrety nukes" in......uh...ANY Final Fantasy game, come to think of it. They tend to have Holy for that and nothing else.

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As for the gap:

It's why I called it a proxy. There will not be any "this is how hard it is to optimize" gauge or metric on any website for any Job. That's why those bars make good proxies for it. They capture how punishing failure is, but ALSO how difficult it is to optimize.

But speaking more specifically, how hard IS IT to optimize WAR? The opening is incredibly straightforward, and the priority system is really simple as well. You don't really optimize Infuriate use, you just (a) prevent over capping and (b) use charges in burst. The "using a Beast Gauge skill reduced Infuriate CD by 5 sec" isn't really something you DO, it's something you react to, and in practice, is just "Infurate has a 30 sec CD" or whatnot based on average Beast Gauge use. The extra oGCDs are likewise "use in burst" (Upheaval and Onslaught) with the caveat of saving an Onslaught if you know you need it elsewhere in the fight, and WAR can weave in between all of its abilities (2 between most, only 1 for Primal Rend, I believe it is?, due to the animation lock).

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"anyone here" - No, you and people who think like you. There are others here that might disagree. In any case, I didn't say they were easier or WHM was harder. I said using the best proxy we have, WHM is actually harder to optimize. But again, it's a proxy. The takeaway is that they're roughly comparable, or alternatively, not too far apart. Especially comparing something like WHM vs BLM or WAR vs MNK.

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I'm thinking more like 1%, not 3%.

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The reason for using Thaliak IS because of the discrepancy - we're talking about changes that affect the entire playerbase, not just Savage raiders. That's why we have to look at the entire playerbase, not just Savage raiders. And I DID use P9S as a counterpoint...and noted that the bars are even SMALLER there, did I not? That the result of looking at Savage is that the gap actually gets SMALLER, not larger, for WAR (also WHM, but WAR gets smaller still). I used both so that both arguments could be addressed.

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/sigh

Well, again, clearly you don't think they're good ideas because you don't do them. But for the record, you try to call me out on them all the time and, as I often point out, do so wrongly. So it's less I'm a hypocrite and more you want me to be a hypocrite and insisting I am. But regardless, even if you believed it was true, doing so all the time IS heckling.

Likewise, I rarely (if ever) say my opinions ARE FACTS. I will list numbers and things, those are facts, and I will discuss things (where I neither state they are facts and often hedge on them - for example, pointing out the bars on the abacus are a proxy for optimization, but not optimization itself...something I WOULDN'T do if I was stating my position as fact or trying to mislead people). And of all of us posters on the healer forum, I'm one of only a few (about three I can think of) that ever HAVE outright owned up to mistakes, and have done so several times. Each time, instead of a "fair enough", I get badgered even more for it, and people bring it up in some cases years later to keep badgering me about, meaning if I didn't own up to them, I'd actually be better off since you wouldn't be able to say "remember that time you admitted you were wrong?!", yet I still do it anyway when a mistake is outright wrong. In fact, sometimes when doing it, I get harassed for not doing it "good enough" (if you want to mention the dungeon running thread where my REPEATED tries to get it right were met with "You refuse to admit you're wrong!!" even though I was doing so and trying to adjust to what was correct. I was harassed EVEN MORE for admitting to not being correct in a "you can't do anything right, not even admit you're wrong" way!).

...contrast this with the way that _I_ behave: If someone makes a mistake, EVEN IF they initially double down on it, if they at any time own up and say so, I say "Fair enough, moving on". I don't hold it against them, and I never bring it up again. I have on one occasion brought up things from the past in a lump, exactly to point this out, and instead of getting the point, everyone attacked me for it. The same people that never call out anyone else doing so. Double standards abound. But FOR MY PART, if someone does own up to something, I actually do the mature adult thing and let it go. And I certainly don't bring it up to other people in other areas of the forum to try and discredit people, nor do I keep a list or running tally ready to pounce on people at a moments notice to discredit them.

When I do get things completely and verifiably wrong, I do say so. This is again a problem that I often don't, but you want to interpret it as, when my position is correct based on interpretation/point of view (that is, when the thing being argued isn't fact or has room for interpretation; yet even some of THOSE cases do I say that I could see people seeing it as wrong and will amend my statement to be more accurate).

But it doesn't matter, does it? Even if I started doing things to your perfect liking from now on, you'd still try to hammer me with those things. So it changes nothing either way. Hell, you even still say I never admit when I'm wrong when I've outright done so several times. So reality isn't relevant to your viewpoint on this matter.

Moreover, you don't police anyone else's viewpoint AND you started doing this to me before I posted my sig, meaning it wasn't triggered by the sig in the first place, you just wanted to call me out for things in general, especially when in threads with people that weren't part of our typical discussions to alienate them from my posts and perspectives - an ad hominem fallacy.

Regardless, it's still heckling, and it still derails threads and breaks up good faith discussions every time you do it, and yet you do it over and over again, no matter how many times this is pointed out to you, leading me to think that is your goal since it would be very easy for you to just...not...do that.

But let's stop this, shall we? Take what last word you want, I'm going to move on now. With that out of the way...

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I agree downtime will, which is why I think the solution is some part more buttons (for some Healer Jobs) and some part just making things that interact better. For WHM before, I suggested a 3xGlare Holy Might to breakup the rotation. For SCH (when not suggesting going back to SB), I proposed things like having Energy Drain on the Faerie Gauge, having a Miasma/Ruin 2 hybrid for another DoT, and some mechanic to spread them. Those are things to address that downtime.

I think the issue here is what would prevent someone from being bored. One person's bored is another person's about right, and one person's exciting is another person's overwhelming. How do we thread that needle?

My proposal is to have different Jobs at different levels of complexity. This is what literally every other role in the game does right now. No other role has all their members equally high complex, equally hard to optimize, or every constituent Job "easy to learn, hard to master". None. Instead, they have a spread across their constituent Jobs, and people are allowed to pick and gravitate to the level of intensity, complexity, or simplicity they like personally.

That way, if there's a Tank that wants more intensity, they play GNB instead of WAR. A DPS goes BLM instead of SMN. And if they don't? Then they go with WAR or SMN. And if they want something in the middle? They go with those options (PLD/DRK or RDM). And this somehow works for EVERY other role in the game. It should work for Healers as well.

[ForsakenRoe]

I'm thinking more like 1%, not 3%.

I could make it 0%, literally identical damage whether you full sweat or just press Glare. Dia's 310 over it's full duration, Banish is 310, Glare is 310. Quite literally impossible to make a mistake, when everything is completely identical. And you know what? People would still do less damage than others on it. Because you know what the biggest thing that causes people to lose damage is? Not pressing their buttons. No amount of potency fine tuning can help someone that does not roll their GCD correctly. If anything, it'd be more beneficial to such a player if there were MORE disparity between CD/time locked skills like a DOT or Banish, because as long as the player uses those at the right times, a Glare that has way less potency has way less effect on the overall output of the player

Oh, and the SGE MP cost thing? Doesn't affect the damage rotation. It's just to make MP only be a concern for people who are trying to optimize the Kardia stuff, so if a new player tries to start learning it, makes a misplay and starts to panic, they don't need to worry about 'oh no I'm out of MP because of my mistake', Prognosis would be 0MP and always there as a safety cushion for them to stabilize and mentally reset. One of the biggest pain points I had with Disc in WOW was when I invariably messed up while learning, there just wasn't any good 'oh shit' buttons to salvage the situation, so I figured having one of those would be good for learners and/or times in raid where you don't have enough time to 'set up', and need shielding right now

And this somehow works for EVERY other role in the game. It should work for Healers as well.

I don't think this point is in contention, so much as the followup of '...and for this reason, WHM (or one of the other non-AST healers) needs to remain at it's current level of complexity (or lack thereof)'. I'm fine with WHM staying the 'beginner healer' or whatever. I just disagree with what that looks like. I think that even beginners should have more gameplay for their levelling through the story than 'refresh DOT and press Glare'. I don't think what I suggested is in any way 'too complex' for a healer, or 'as complex as a DPS'. It's just a shortened DOT and a 15s CD. Hell, we literally had that in ARR, a 12s DOT and a 15s CD (Fluid Aura), just back then, FA was an OGCD. This being GCD actually makes it 'more simple' because you don't have to worry about 'oh i have only space for one weave, do I use Temperance to save the team or do I use the damage button for damage', no you just use the damage GCD on the GCD and then weave Temp right after it, there's no conflict of priorities

[TheDustyOne]

I guess my thinking on this is that WHM isn't about "big slow turrety nukes" in......uh...ANY Final Fantasy game, come to think of it. They tend to have Holy for that and nothing else.

Depends on the game, the first game had Dia as the undead nuke. But that's also irrelevant, this is FFXIV, a modern tab-target MMO, not IV or X. A lot of older WHM were also SMN, so they still had access to rather powerful nukes. Likewise, in most previous FF games with a job system, WHM is the counterpart to BLM; restorative vs destructive, light vs dark, etc. Both were casters that specialized in big numbers, low health, and being overall squishy. Having WHM being the healer version of BLM makes sense, and adapting BLM style mechanics to a healer like WHM would possibly even convince people who enjoy BLM to try out WHM.

As for the gap:

It's why I called it a proxy. There will not be any "this is how hard it is to optimize" gauge or metric on any website for any Job. That's why those bars make good proxies for it. They capture how punishing failure is, but ALSO how difficult it is to optimize.

It's a poor proxy because some jobs will go through stupid lengths to gain a few extra points of potency while others are more or less optimal without too much effort. Again, you'd be suggesting that NIN is as hard as SMN because it has a similar gap. As far as I'm concerned the logs only really tell how punishing a job might be if you mess up, but it doesn't tell the full story behind each of those fights or how hard a job is to master. It's not a good metric to use for that.

But speaking more specifically, how hard IS IT to optimize WAR? The opening is incredibly straightforward, and the priority system is really simple as well. You don't really optimize Infuriate use, you just (a) prevent over capping and (b) use charges in burst. The "using a Beast Gauge skill reduced Infuriate CD by 5 sec" isn't really something you DO, it's something you react to, and in practice, is just "Infurate has a 30 sec CD" or whatnot based on average Beast Gauge use. The extra oGCDs are likewise "use in burst" (Upheaval and Onslaught) with the caveat of saving an Onslaught if you know you need it elsewhere in the fight, and WAR can weave in between all of its abilities (2 between most, only 1 for Primal Rend, I believe it is?, due to the animation lock).

It's why I tend to say "engaging to master" rather than "hard to master". I don't consider WAR hard to master at all (although I fully admit I haven't taken it into difficult content this expansion, someone else can go over larger details on getting the most out of it), but I still consider it good fun and it has things to watch out for. Besides, Infuriate being reduced with every Fell Cleave means I have something to watch out for before I commit to a Fell Cleave, in that sense, I'm not "reacting" to it after the fact, I'm contemplating it beforehand, I'm planning out my usages of Fell Cleave and Infuriate so that I don't accidently overcap either the gauge or cooldown. What does WHM have that is similar? That I press Dia every 30s or that I have to watch Assize? These things have no interaction with each other and aren't particularly engaging or fulfilling. They're boring, they don't lead to anything else. Fell Cleave at least leads to me using Infuriate more often than not using Fell Cleave.

"anyone here" - No, you and people who think like you. There are others here that might disagree. In any case, I didn't say they were easier or WHM was harder. I said using the best proxy we have, WHM is actually harder to optimize. But again, it's a proxy. The takeaway is that they're roughly comparable, or alternatively, not too far apart. Especially comparing something like WHM vs BLM or WAR vs MNK.

There's certainly a lot of people who seem to think like me then. Either way you're not doing a good job of convincing me or them.

Like I said earlier, it's a terrible proxy and doesn't tell the full story. At most it tells you how punishing a job might be to play poorly, not how hard it is to play well.

I'm thinking more like 1%, not 3%.

I need more context behind what you mean by this. Are you correcting the numbers, or are you saying that it should only be 1% between optimal and non-optimal? If it's the former it makes your argument against Roe worse, if it's the latter, then there is no common ground and you make playing well vs playing poorly meaningless. It'd be like telling your best worker, the one who shows up on time, works overtime, has incredible knowledge in his field, that he only gets 1% extra pay compared to the guy who shows up late, screws up basic things, and leaves before everyone else clocks out. It's downright insulting.

The reason for using Thaliak IS because of the discrepancy - we're talking about changes that affect the entire playerbase, not just Savage raiders. That's why we have to look at the entire playerbase, not just Savage raiders. And I DID use P9S as a counterpoint...and noted that the bars are even SMALLER there, did I not? That the result of looking at Savage is that the gap actually gets SMALLER, not larger, for WAR (also WHM, but WAR gets smaller still). I used both so that both arguments could be addressed.

That large range includes players who legitimately don't offer anything to a fight and skew what would be average play up to above average. Extremes sets a skill floor that everyone has to meet or they fail, casual content doesn't. That's fine for casual content to lower that floor considerably, but it's poor for assessing how a job is balanced for unskilled play vs skilled play because you now make "not playing your job" a viable tactic for an odd party member or 2.

Also again the gap doesn't matter, it's only smaller because the floor for clearing is higher.

[ForsakenRoe]

I need more context behind what you mean by this. Are you correcting the numbers, or are you saying that it should only be 1% between optimal and non-optimal? If it's the former it makes your argument against Roe worse, if it's the latter, then there is no common ground and you make playing well vs playing poorly meaningless.

I'll correct some numbers: the disparity was 2%, and was 'playing my design of WHM optimally (that is, Banish every 15s and Dia every 12s) on a training dummy', versus 'playing my design of WHM as you would now against a dummy (that is, ignoring Banish because it is new, and refreshing Dia every 12s 'because it fell off'). Ignoring Dia too, or only refreshing it every 30s as it would be now (meaning 18s out of ever 30 has no Dia active), would raise that percentage. However, to be fair with the comparison, we'd have to look at ignoring Dia entirely in both versions. In my version, 15 Glares, 4 Banishes and 5 Dias totals 8200p, and using only Glare would be 7440p. That's 90.73170731707317% effectiveness (thanks percentagecalculator.net). Current WHM gets 22 Glares and 2 Dias, at a total of 8250p, and using only Glare gets you, again, 7440p, which is 90.18181818181819%. By the slimmest of margins, the design I put forth is actually less punishing than the current one!

I agree with the whole 'what is the point if the gap between suboptimal and optimal is so minimal' on one side but not on the other. I don't think it's good to make something punishing to casuals, so that only expert super pros can get anywhere with the job. But, I also don't think the class should be completely autopilot. Even if I were to make the damage potencies equalized, so Glare/Dia/Banish did the exact same damage, you'd still be incentivized in my design to use the other two skills instead of Glarespam, because while Glare gives 1 point of gauge for 'the cool strong heal move', Banish and Dia give 5 (with Dia requiring it's full duration to do so). You'd be hamstringing your gauge build speed in order to spam Glare, which means less access to the heal, which means you'd potentially have to cover elsewhere with a GCD heal like a Medica that you otherwise wouldn't. At which point, kinda defeats the argument about why Glarespam needs to be within 1%, doesn't it?

Any new dps rotation buttons that a healer could get should be entirely new buttons if the goal is to break up the pace of pressing the same one button over, and over again. However, most healer hotbars are already pretty loaded, and are at risk of bloat. So which healing buttons would everyone be willing to either cut or consolidate to make room for extra dps buttons?

My WHM suggestion requires only two buttons at minimum, and ideally, four to add an extra two Lily spenders that shield instead of heal (so when we prep Misery for raidbuffs, we can get some use from the Lily by shielding, instead of it being 100% overheal). To that end, I have quite a lot of space free on the bars, but if needed, Cure1 can upgrade into Cure2 (both being 500mp), and Medica1 can upgrade to Medica2 (both being 1000mp). After a single tick of healing, Med2 is equal to Med1, so just slap the HOT effect onto Med1 at level 50 and problem solved. That's two spaces right there, enough for the core of the idea to function. The rest of it is clever use of ability-swaps, like how WAR's Fell Cleave turns into Inner Chaos for one hit.

For SCH I'd need 2 spaces, and one can be Physick upgrading to Adlo (change Adlo's effect from 300p, 180% shield, to 450p, 120% shield, and the shield stays the same potency while the base heal matches Physick). The other one I'm not too sure on. Knowing SE they'll make the decision for me and remove Energy Drain again

For AST, I actually removed a button (Combust, it feels a bit superfluous), and instead it's entirely 'reworked effect' of existing buttons. Fully focused on making the cards feel like they have character again

For SGE, I didn't add or remove anything, everything was again 'reworked effect' of existing buttons. Making the class have more interplay with Kardia, and making it into an actual system instead of 'its a thing that exists and you sometimes forget to put up at the start of the dungeon'