Would you rather healers get more complex healing kits or more complex DPS kits?

[PyurBlue]

Healing comes first? Sure but It's not like healing comes before damage when you can already do both at the same time, Pressing your ogcd button once in a while when a AOE or stack comes out isn't really fun "healing"

You're misunderstanding what I meant by more GCD healing, I don't think pressing medica 10 times in a row is fun gameplay either, OGCD's barely require planning you just press one and heal/mitgate a mech and have the rest of your ogcds. Planning OGCD's would actually be more impactful if you had fewer because they could lead to gains in the first place, right now you really don't need to plan much... maybe in harder fights but a lot of them don't even need healers. OGCD's being a good thing only works if you don't have a abundance of them, I personally think having the need to gcd heal here and there would make it more fun then just pressing one of your 5 OGCD raid wide buttons while ur cohealer also does so in raids.

I'm not saying oh yeah healers should spam medica! fun gameplay, but healers should be actively pressing gcds more often in my opinion, Healer is at it's most fun when you've got to make choices between DPS/Healing, It should be difficult to maximise damage output while healing that's what makes it fun, That also has a helps other Job's utility abilities be more impactful.

You're right, I misinterpreted your post. While OGCD's themselves aren't bad, they need to be balanced against the amount of damage the party is taking. Currently we have too much healing/too little damage, and most of it is tightly scripted, which takes away a lot of the planning and resource management aspects that we could have.

[Rithy255]

You're right, I misinterpreted your post. While OGCD's themselves aren't bad, they need to be balanced against the amount of damage the party is taking. Currently we have too much healing/too little damage, and most of it is tightly scripted, which takes away a lot of the planning and resource management aspects that we could have.

Yeah I can fully get where you're coming from if you thought I meant Healers should only gcd heal and barely attack, I could have worded it a bit better, I think ogcds are good with the right amount with the right amount of strength, The big issue I should have highlighted was fight design but that's also the most hardest one to rework.

I think A lot of my issues is I usually play healers/Tanks In a lot of games I'm not just a pure DPS minded player (although I think I play DPS more then healer in ff14 for obvious reasons.) and I think a lot of DPS players look at Healer and go "oh that's boring, one damage button seriously?" when the issue is more that Healers fail to appeal to healer players. While DPS buttons may make healer slightly more fun, I almost always would still rather Just play a DPS at that point,

I think DPS buttons and differences could even be fun on healers it just has to be interesting Like what I loved about SHB white mage is that you had Long cast times so it felt more like a healer version Black mage and positioning was more important, Now you barely need to cast to move (1.5 with slide casting), So that feels a bit lost to me... Personally With DPS I just want the healers to have slightly different things without being a actual rotation with certain things like proc's or different cast times as I mentioned.

The Thing about Healer design I think people don't realise is that it actually negatively effects a lot more then just healers, Utility is a key example which I've already talked about I love that some DPS actually have utility and support options but if it doesn't even help most the time nor save Healer GCD's then it feels pointless to have said utility.

[PyurBlue]

The big problem with oGCDs isn't that they exist

Right, if OGCD heals are too strong and are all purpose problem solvers, then the balance gets thrown off and healers are left with oversimplified DPS rotation and oversimplified healing tools (press random OGCD).

I lean more toward encounter design being the problem, but you can approach it from the class design standpoint and weaken OGCD abilities to make healers think more about healing. Just don't go too far and reverse the problem so that healing is pressing the same spells constantly.

This would be fine, except then what do you do with that empty GCD?

The thing about damage is that it's the easiest kind of filler to have because outputting damage is never a bad thing. With healing you can overheal, so there is such a thing as too much healing. I think you can have an interesting healing system even if the rotation is DPS heavy, maybe by tweaking OGCD skills to work in combinations rather than stand alone abilities. Things as they are now are far from perfect, but I can see potential in weaving heals between damage casts. The system looks salvageable, though the best way to do that would need to be worked out.

The big issue I should have highlighted was fight design but that's also the most hardest one to rework.

That's true, especially when it comes to reworking existing content. On the other hand I feel like some amount of encounter design evolution needs to happen to bring the most out of healing.

While DPS buttons may make healer slightly more fun, I almost always would still rather Just play a DPS at that point

Without healing, healers just become simplified DPS like you said, so the healing aspect does need to be prioritized. FF14 is naturally very focused on damage by design, and I think that's partially what lead to the current situation we're in regarding GCD vs OGCD healing. Predictability of damage is a big factor as in most cases you can map out what to press through a fight and stick to that list unless things go very wrong. Simply adding an element of randomness should do a lot to shake up how players approach healing, and I think it would also naturally increase the value of GCD based healing since it's more responsive without cooldowns.

what I loved about SHB white mage is that you had Long cast times so it felt more like a healer version Black mage and positioning was more important

I completely understand how you feel about WHM. With the long cast times it made positioning feel a lot different than AST for example which gave them both a bit more identity.

The Thing about Healer design I think people don't realise is that it actually negatively effects a lot more then just healers, Utility is a key example which I've already talked about I love that some DPS actually have utility and support options but if it doesn't even help most the time nor save Healer GCD's then it feels pointless to have said utility.

I usually look at DPS utility as more of emergency buttons than something to help healers, but there is a bit of both. Addle and Feint are definitely support tools while Manaward and Second Wind either help the caster directly or are reserved for atypical situations. When I'm healing I sometimes notice the DPS trying to help by using their own skills, but sometimes it doesn't really amount to anything because I'm going to just AoE heal everyone anyway. Circling back to what I said about unpredictability, I don't mind keeping the utility tools as infrequently used backup options, but I can also see your viewpoint where they would become more commonly relied on to help maximize party performance through cooperation between DPS and healers.

Also sorry for the really short quotes, I was trying to keep the post under the text limit so I wouldn't have to edit in my response, but I went over anyway.