Do healers actually want a more complex damage rotation?

[Arrhin]

In Dawntrail my experience so far (Limited, like my gametime) it's still the old Tank self heals issue. When I'm healing I feel like the third wheel. Tanks are self healing or mitigating through most things, aggro is baby talk to maintain so I barely need to heal. Add to this the lame DPS "rotation" and you have pissy healers. For example last night we borked a final boss mechanic in the first DT dungeon and our pug WAR solo'd the last boss. Complete and total let down for everyone except that WAR. YoshiP needs to actually play the game he holds in such high regard as, idk, something other than a DPS... Force him to run healer extensively before any further gameplay decisions are made.

[Lambdafish]

Of course I did, my criticism is that the argument you're making is that we're being given no reason to heal so we should have engaging damage rotations instead. There are literally 13 jobs built around engaging damaging rotations so if thats what you want, go play them.

If we want to fix healers then we should advocate for exactly that, fix healers. Make healing more engaging, make it more required and give us more difficult encounters to justify it.

I think you missed the point entirely. I'm advocating for healers to have more engaging anything, focusing on paths to power, and resource management, and only mentioning DPS because it is easier to give healers more engaging DPS to make moment-to-moment gameplay more fun than it is to fundamentally change the entire battle system including the design of tanks and DPS on top of healers, as well as encounter design, in order to make healing engaging enough to make up for the inevitable downtime that healers will still have.

I've said this before, but one big complaint about healers is that they are unnecessary in dungeons. This isn't actually a healer issue, it's a dungeon issue, since dungeons are the only content in the game held up by one healer, with no way for other roles to raise the healer outside of the chance of RDM or SMN. Dungeons have to be braindead for a healer to heal, otherwise one healer struggling to pass a mechanic means that the entire party is roadblocked, and that's not the sort of whiplash we need from casual content. For healers to ever become engaging on their healing kit alone, the concept of dungeons needs to fundamentally change.

[Azurarok]

I think the main reason I want them is how much worse they feel to play solo, having started the game with CNJ in 5.3 and sticking with WHM through mid-HW. I leveled the rest of the jobs to 70 partway into SB and I still remember how much I was blown away by how much more the others had.

And it's not really that I want it to be that complex on the job either. I really like what WHM has right now, between PoM, Assize, Lilies, now Glare IV. They just don't happen often enough.

Also all healers getting their nukes changed to a 1.5s cast didn't help either. AST's malefic spam worked because the card management was there. There were other ways they could've handled mobility/weaving for the others and they instead went with homogenization.

[Arrhin]

They literally can’t fix healing though because if they scaled enemy damage output to be proportional to healer’s capabilities, healing requirements would skyrocket so high the average player would be entirely incapable of completing even normal content (allegedly). If they inverted the strength of gcd/ogcd, again that’s too hard for the new players. If they removed the majority of oGCD and forces healers to gcd, the forums would just be flooded with people screeching about how they’ve been turned into ‘cure bots’.
Like imagine the abject outrage people would have if they made freecure fishing a genuine advantage and not something people complain about their healer doing on Reddit.

Unfortunately, there’s simply no way to follow the logic of the game’s design without coming to the conclusion that basically the only thing players will really accept is, ‘healing must always be so easy it can be done by anyone’. That’s not technically touching on the major reworking of the entirety of ffxiv’s combat system to make ‘healers healing’ actually work. Thus, for many people the only logical follow-up is, ‘they should have more fun doing dps then’. I mean, what else are they gonna do? Support the party? Look how that turned out for Astrologian

I think a gentle nerf of Tank mitigation/self heal, and a slight reduction in enmity generation -might- be enough without re-balancing the whole convoluted mess. It could bring the skill floor for tanking and healing up ever so slightly without making either role too burdensome for more casual players. There does need to be SOME skill involved or what is the point of playing them?

[flowerkatie]

They literally can’t ‘fix healing’ though because if they scaled enemy damage output to be proportional to healer’s capabilities, healing requirements would skyrocket so high the average player would be entirely incapable of completing even normal content (allegedly). If they inverted the strength of gcd/ogcd, again that’s too hard for the new players. If they removed the majority of oGCD and forces healers to gcd, the forums would just be flooded with people screeching about how they’ve been turned into ‘cure bots’.
Like imagine the abject outrage people would have if they made freecure fishing a genuine advantage and not something people complain about their healer doing on Reddit.

Unfortunately, there’s simply no way to follow the logic of the game’s design without coming to the conclusion that basically the only thing players will really accept is, ‘healing must always be so easy it can be done by anyone’. And that’s not even touching on the major reworking of the entirety of ffxiv’s combat system to make ‘healers healing’ actually work. Thus, for many people the only logical follow-up is, ‘they should have more fun doing dps then’. I mean, what else are they gonna do? Support the party? Look how that turned out for Astrologian. And when it comes to removing dps options to force ‘healers to heal’, you have to look no further than Scholar’s Energy Drain removal to see how extremely unpopular that attempt was

This entire logic that people have though completely contradicts itself. If you make DPS more complex and engaging then you'll get complaints about it being too difficult, so what if they keep it somewhat simple? Then it wont fix anything, it'll still be boring? Okay, make it so being good at the rotation is irrelevent so at least its fun for some; well, now we've only tailored for parsing and people who care about doing the rotation properly.

I don't see how that fixes, if we see people "Complaining" and "Crying" as a reason that something should not be fixed then you'll never find any solution because people always dislike change.

[Naychan]

Hopefully this wont come across as argumentative because I'm just genuinely curious if the majority of people want a more complex damage rotation on healers? Or is it just the case they want more difficulty and identity for the role?

It Does not have to be overly complex but a few extra options would be nice.
wall to wall pulls Old scholar atherflow > aldo on tank > dome> dot & Dot > Bane > heal > ae > dot & dot, Bane > Heal > ae > atherflow
current scholar on pull ather flow > aldo > Dome > AE, AE, AE, AE, AE, Ae, > heal > AE, AE, Ae, AE, AE, AE, AE , AE, Heal > encounter over
Im wearing out buttons 1-3 on my keyboard Nuke - dot - AE

that pretty much sums up dungeons,

[flowerkatie]

It Does not have to be overly complex but a few extra options would be nice.
wall to wall pulls Old scholar atherflow > aldo on tank > dome> dot & Dot > Bane > heal > ae > dot & dot, Bane > Heal > ae > atherflow
current scholar on pull ather flow > aldo > Dome > AE, AE, AE, AE, AE, Ae, > heal > AE, AE, Ae, AE, AE, AE, AE , AE, Heal > encounter over
Im wearing out buttons 1-3 on my keyboard Nuke - dot - AE

that pretty much sums up dungeons,

Yeah, you're right. I think a big flaw of my opinion on this, is that I don't often include dungeons when I'm thinking of engaging content and thats a big issue. Healers are in a pretty bad position in dungeons.

[Connor]

I don't see how that fixes, if we see people "Complaining" and "Crying" as a reason that something should not be fixed then you'll never find any solution because people always dislike change.

Unfortunately that’s just the point we’ve reached though. They’ve essentially been backed into a design corner where they can’t change anything without bringing the whole thing down. As a result they’re basically trying to keep everything the exact same as much as possible and appease feedback from every angle, resulting in the current situation where pretty much nobody is happy anymore.

Whether they want more interesting healing, dps options, varied/interesting support options, the game is basically designed for nobody anymore lol. I mean, I’d personally prefer if healers were actual healers with fun and interesting ways to support the party and not ‘discount dps with healing oGCDs’, but for all the reasons I mentioned before there’s simply too many hurdles for them to overcome for that to be something actually doable

[flowerkatie]

Whether they want more interesting healing, dps options, varied/interesting support options, the game is basically designed for nobody anymore lol. I mean, I’d personally prefer if healers were actual healers with fun and interesting ways to support the party and not ‘discount dps with healing oGCDs’, but for all the reasons I mentioned before there’s simply too many hurdles for them to overcome for that to be something actually doable

Yeah, agreed

[Lambdafish]

Yeah, you're right. I think a big flaw of my opinion on this, is that I don't often include dungeons when I'm thinking of engaging content and thats a big issue. Healers are in a pretty bad position in dungeons.

The one thing I do agree with you on is that healer DPS should be fundamentally different from other roles. There needs to be a flow between healing and DPS that uses the same resources, and allows decision making between powerful heals and powerful DPS. Aetherflow is a good example of this, but it is the most basic and barebones form of this job design.