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

[Mayhemmer]

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.

I doubt there will ever be content in this game that requires even remotely close to 100% of your inputs to be just purely healing or mitigation, so there will always be the need and desire for dps options. Again, it's not a binary choice. You can have both. The current issue seems to be that the dps options are unengaging, and the healing is overtuned.

[Avoidy]

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.

God I wish this were a thing. So few DPS/Tanks bother mitigating anyway; I wish they'd just give healers Feint, Addle, Reprisal, etc. Give me something else to do. These other guys are barely doing it anyway.
Providing meaningful support would mean revamping the whole party synergy structure. ATM, groups only really care about each others existence every two minutes when they sync their buffs up, but if we suddenly had to rely on each other for mana upkeep (which would mean making all jobs use mana) as just one example, then suddenly healers can be the group's mana battery and have something else to pay attention to. This opens the door for a lot of "I hate this change because randoms suck at keeping my mana up and I can't do my rotation" complaints, but that's just basic skill expression. A bad healer is now affecting your party. Unlike now, where in 95% of content, a healer isn't even needed.

I alluded to this in my earlier post, but I think if healers had more buffs/debuffs/team resource management to juggle, then having a less complex damage rotation wouldn't even feel like a loss. I can only say this confidently because I've seen it done successfully in the past. I personally wouldn't mind Glare being my only offensive button, but what's annoying is I'm only pressing glare for the vast majority of an encounter when there's room for so much more if cbu3 would just go back to their roots and actually take inspiration from other mmos again.

[Zeastria]

1) Make our DOT AOE! - so we would have something of an aoe rota / DoT--> AOE.
2) 1-2-3 combo into 1 button and tie it to a personal LB ability(workes both AOE/ST)..
( and make it so healing dont brake the combos).

[ChrysOCE]

God I wish this were a thing. So few DPS/Tanks bother mitigating anyway; I wish they'd just give healers Feint, Addle, Reprisal, etc. Give me something else to do. These other guys are barely doing it anyway.
Providing meaningful support would mean revamping the whole party synergy structure. ATM, groups only really care about each others existence every two minutes when they sync their buffs up, but if we suddenly had to rely on each other for mana upkeep (which would mean making all jobs use mana) as just one example, then suddenly healers can be the group's mana battery and have something else to pay attention to. This opens the door for a lot of "I hate this change because randoms suck at keeping my mana up and I can't do my rotation" complaints, but that's just basic skill expression. A bad healer is now affecting your party. Unlike now, where in 95% of content, a healer isn't even needed.

I alluded to this in my earlier post, but I think if healers had more buffs/debuffs/team resource management to juggle, then having a less complex damage rotation wouldn't even feel like a loss. I can only say this confidently because I've seen it done successfully in the past. I personally wouldn't mind Glare being my only offensive button, but what's annoying is I'm only pressing glare for the vast majority of an encounter when there's room for so much more if cbu3 would just go back to their roots and actually take inspiration from other mmos again.

Yea, that's where I am coming from. I'm not saying make healers 100% heal. Give us more to do, outside of healing, but not focused on DPS. As it is right now, the majority of encounters is DPSing first and healing when required. So, of course DPS is boring. That's primarily what we are doing.

[SieyaM]

snip

I feel like this isn't skill expression as much as it is just knowing how to use your skills properly and quickly. Expression for me would mean something like having certain skills that were useful in certain situations or party compositions and knowing what to use when is important to the class. AST before the card change actually had this because you had to know what cards would be most useful for what jobs and which ones you could afford to burn for enhanced effects. Having a healer that when played properly allowed full rotations and when played poorly did not isn't as much skill expression as a skill threshold.

[SieyaM]

What a lot of healers want and I would too out of the role is to not exactly have a DPS rotation with heals on the side, but to just be busy during downtime which this game has a lot of for healers. Since balancing and designing support abilities is difficult and time consuming the dev team will not commit to it so we are left with just making DPS more interesting for the role.

[Mayhemmer]

I'm not against the idea of trimming raid buffs and support tools from non-support oriented DPS jobs and doling them out among healers and support-oriented jobs, but not only that. Actually weaving those buffs and support tools into healers kits in ways that are more engaging and complex than just hitting one button for a raid-wide damage boost or mit. Though to do that, I feel like they'd have to move away from "Press X to get Y" ability design and probably entail extreme healer changes, and I just don't feel like they'd be willing to do that. In fact, they've done the opposite over time. AST giving raid-wide damage buffs went from a process you'd have to think about and could even whiff at times, boiled down now to just pressing Divination.

It's why I think a new healer designed specifically to interact interestingly with party/individual healing and damage received and taken in order to empower their own abilities would be interesting. Imagine if you could place a bubble on your self or a party member that absorbs a portion of damage received for a short amount of time (or on an enemy that absorbs a portion of the damage they take), before then turning into a spendable resource for the healer. You could choose to spend this 'bubble' on damage, a heal, mitigation, regen, or whatever, and the potency of the accumulated damage absorbed would add to the base potency of the effect you use (to a cap). Like old Wildfire, but if you could hang onto it for later use, and it wasn't just damage. It'd give the healer a way to interact with more elements of a fight and their party members on a level that's more complex than just throwing out a shield or a damage buff at the press of one single button.

[Conchoidal]

The main problem with healers currently is one action (Stone/Glare, Broil, Malefic, and Dosis) accounting for >70% of your GCD casts, which only increases as you level and become less reliant on GCD healing. This could be remedied with the following:

1) Reduce the duration of all DoT spells (Aero/Dia, Bio/Biolysis, Combust, and Eukrasian Dosis) - increases the number of casts in an encounter.
2) Incorporate AoE spells into single target - this could be done by adding falloff damage, increasing their potency when executed a single target, or granting a beneficial effect to self or a detrimental effect to enemy.
3) Reduce oGCD healing potential - replacing oGCD heals with GCD heals further reduces casts of Glare/Broil/Malefic/Dosis.
4) Just add another offensive spell - can be done by reintroducing spells such as Miasma, Shadow Flare, Aero III, and Stella or reworking previously existing abilities such as Fluid Aura, Eye for an Eye, and Disable.

[Eastwall]

Make The boss auto hurts like the alexsander normal raid. That will surely let healer actually need to heal with gcd. There is a door boss at a9n. It constantly uses a cleave attack That takes away almost half of a tank's health. Refurbished has similar attack That happens at the same time as its auto attack.

[LilimoLimomo]

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...?

With respect, if you're casting DPS spells often enough to get bored of them in the highest end content available, then it sounds like the healing requirements are tuned too low.