Do healers actually want a more complex damage rotation?

[Zolvolt]

If healing requirements keep me thinking about my cooldowns and ability use every 20 seconds or so then a complicated dps kit isn't a requirement. Though at least one healer should have it. We have 4 healers after all.

[Vladmiere]

There was some truth to that but for scholars it was definately possible to stay in cleric stance for long periods of time. My pet managed to keep most tanks topped out in ARR on dungeon spams. Even the two big ones at the time Palance/Ampa Keep it was faster for my friends group to sustain pulls as my faerie was able to keep the group going most of the time. Also cleric stance for white mage to time holy+stun was viable as well. Cleric stance in Bahamut Coils Part 1 and two was viable at times as well. One healer heals started to become normal after you was half geared in Coils of Bahamut gear and crystal tower and your relic. Being an offensive scholar was the bomb. Scholar was so much fun back then. I was a scholar and not a superior form of a White mage with my new Seraphim aoe regen aura and uber instant cast 25% Galv spam. Aoe out my dots in bane shadowflare and weaving spells and even hitting things with my book was a thing and it was glorious unabashed fun. I do not know why you think cleric stance was a trolling mechanic. It was glorious and I would love to have the wild west of ARR back. The game was not designed for allot of things back then. The cross class skills from the non crystal jobs how stats interacted with our skills ETC. The game was still figuring out what it was meant to do and I miss and will continue to miss it. Call it nostalgia trip if you wish since I have actual fun memories of back then. I do not remember much of the game since Heavensward.

Cleric Stance in ARR, literately swapped MND and INT. So you would go from doing 100% healing to 5% healing. There was a recast delay, so the entire argument against cleric stance was that people doing it are not only contributing nothing to DPS, but being in cleric stance was proof you were not healing.

Tanks in ARR had to maintain enmity. If you cast Medica 2, you ALWAYS ripped the enmity away from the tank. You were punished for overhealing. If a tank tied to stance dance in ARR, you, the healer would keep ending up dead unless you were to stop casting entirely before they did it.

Suffice it to say, "stance dance" was not an intended mechanic in the first place, and the game is better off without it, and anyone saying otherwise, was not playing Tank enough in ARR PUG's to see it.

It is honestly easier to say that mechanically speaking, the game was not designed for you to stance dance, and doing so was a compromise so that healers could do the non-dungeon content, and so tanks could off-tank in two-tank content. If the developers had know players would be so toxic and abusive about DPS as healer or tank, they would have never had the feature carried over from 1.20:

ARR (Recast Time: 30 seconds):

Stormblood (recast time 90 seconds):


Like, quite literately the "swaps int and mnd" part of the ARR version is why it was such a problem, because as gear creeped up, the gap between INT and MND grew. So in level 15 content, that healing loss might not be as noticed, but by the time you got to the level 50 content if you stopped healing for the 35 seconds needed to turn it on and off, you usually wiped the party.

The content was not balanced for healers to DPS in the dungeon content, and has never been so. The overworld and the solo story content assumes a DPS role, that is why we had it, because otherwise, doing any quest in the overworld took 10's of minutes rather than 10's of seconds. I did the entire 1-50 MSQ without using cleric stance, imagine now if fighting a single group of 3 mobs took as long as fighting Zenos. That is what it was like. Yes, you could use cleric stance in the overworld quests, but then you'd usually be retrying them a lot because the damage output, even in cleric stance wasn't high enough to kill a monster before it would kill you, so you would instead not use it, and basically alternate between cure on yourself and stone on the mob. if you made the mistake of using cleric stance, you couldn't heal yourself worth beans. You had to use Repose when there was more than one monster. That is how the game wanted you to do it. The developers didn't design the MSQ in a way that a healer could get through it without grinding levequests for far better gear than needed for the quest.

In a way it's just amazing that the developers thought it was a good idea at all.

[currentlemon]

This is my issue with Glare 4. It's cool that we get it, but it's 3 actions that aren't Glare 3, per 2min. If it were introduced as, say, a 15s CD action, that'd break up the 11 Glares in a row that we currently do into two lots of 4/5 (depending on which has the Dia refresh with it). Lowering Dia's duration to make it feel more 'bursty' would help break the Glare blocks up even further. In fact, I've done maths previously and worked out that, if you did have a new action at 15s, and made Dia 12s duration, then you'd reduce the number of Glares per minute from 18 out of a possible 24 GCDs (75%) to 11 out of 24 (46ish%). The longest block of 'back to back Glare 3 casts' would be FOUR, instead of our current ELEVEN.

I agree, we don't need overly complex damage rotations for healer. But 'press Dia every 5th GCD, press 15s CD every 6th GCD' isn't exactly pushing the boundaries of complexity, IMO. It's well within the acceptable 'complexity level' for a healer to have

The addition of Glare IV made it possible for WHM to have a mini-DPS rotation. However, some changes need to happen to three of it's DPS in order for that rotation to exist. Separating Glare IV into it's own independent GCD ability on a 15 or 20 sec cooldown, lowering Dia's DoT duration from 30secs to 12 or 15 secs, and lowering PoM CD to 60secs while keeping the three free Glare IVs. I'd also include Holy as well since it's a Final Fantasy staple. Though the only thing I can think of is turning the ability into an AoE DoT after PoM is used.