Do healers actually want a more complex damage rotation?

[Zeastria]

Complex DPS does NOT translate to (=) engaging/fun gameplay, not for me.

I previously made an example
of how i would have reworked SCH "dps kit".
Into something more fun,yet simple.

To give an example
based on what I think is fun
and the level of complexity im looking at.

SCH:
Let us spread our DoT [Biolysis] with [Deployment Tactics] Like in PvP.

[Broil] have 50% change to trigger an another ability [New ST Ability].

[New Dot]
Add another DoT ability,
which also can be spread with [Deployment Tactics]!.

[Art of War]
has increased radius.

[Energy Drain] has an addional effect:
inc your DoT(s) dmg by x% for x sec.
(does NOT stack).
(still used for weaving between Broils
and to dump aetherflow stacks)

[Dissipation]
Addional effect:
Make [Energy Drain] free to cast
during it's duration (30s)

What does this give:

1. One extra ST button to press.
2. Two Dots (not counting the new dot tied to chain stratagem).
3. Both Dots can be spread with [Deployment Tactics].
4. [Dissipation] (2min cd)
Gets an additonal effects that let you spam energy drain w/o cost,
meaning you can use [Energy Drain]s w/o worrying about
useing your aetherflow stacks duing that window (30s).
5.[Energy Drain] buffs your next DoTs ( adding some depth).

However they don't need make all healers the same in terms of complexity!
Players who wants more complex jobs should have the option to pick just that..
likewise those who want simpler job.

[Azurarok]

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.

I'm really on the fence with healing and dps resources that are mutually exclusive to each other because there are folks out there that try to offload healing to their co-healer and spend them on dps instead, no matter how small the gain is. I don't know how often it happens, but it definitely has made for some really messy partyfinders in the past. And these aren't learning parties that's happened in, either.

[Rolder50]

I want healing to be a more interesting and engaging experience. I really don't care how they get there, whether it be more healing requirements, a better DPS rotation, more support tools, a little of each, whatever.

[Rithy255]

not a "damage rotation" this is a really odd thing to ask for, I think something more akin to casters or ranged, where you're not following a strict button rotation of 1, 2, 3 (ect lol)

When I ask for more DPS spells on healer im not asking for a "rotation", I'd want procs, different Dot timers or just more spells I guess you can call that a "rotation" but I'd consider that sort of stuff different and infact more interesting on healer jobs then a "rotation"

I'd even want more nuanced things like different cast times, such as long cast times on White mage, theirs a lot you can do with some extra dps spells rather then a "rotation of them".

[HyoMinPark]

What healers initially wanted was to feel more engaged while playing their role. The earliest forms of these pleas that I read and participated in were actively asking for the developers to give them more incoming damage to heal—not at a Savage-level, but just upping the damage in lower-end content just enough to make use of the myriad of healing tools the devs kept bloating our kits with.

Well, when the developers went on the record to say “We will not be increasing the amount of healing that healers need to do—if you want to heal more, then go do Ultimate”, THAT was when healers started asking for a more engaging DPS system. There were already murmurings of it around the time ShB Media Tour started up and we saw that the healers had been reduced to 1 DoT and 1 nuke. SB healing for WHM and SCH at least had 2~3 DoTs to manage to give us a bit more variety in our GCD presses.

Most healer mains aren’t asking for a DPS-role level of complexity when we ask for more damage buttons (which, again, we only started asking for when the devs made it clear our first demand of more healing to actively do would not be entertained). A lot of us were content with just bringing back a second DoT on a different timer (so, not 30s) to manage. Think Aero III on SB WHM: we had Aero II and Aero III to manage in between pressing Stone IV. Aero II was 18s and Aero III was 24s; so they were refreshed at different intervals and not always back-to-back before continuing to throw rocks at a boss. It wasn’t complex, but it broke up the single-target nuke spam monotony of the job. Plus, Aero III was AOE, so it also broke up Holy spam in dungeons.

The argument from those who always contested this was “well you just want to play a damage dealer!” or “go play a DPS job then and leave the healing to us!”. But, in my opinion, that argument missed the crux of the issue: we had already tried to ask for more healing, were denied, so we shifted to asking for SOMETHING to make all the DPSing we were doing in ANY CONTENT (so, not just Savage/Ultimate) engaging. We never asked to have a DPS role style rotation. The most I ever saw was someone asking if WHM could maybe have a 1-2 “combo” since we went into EW still only having one DoT and one nuke (and I am fairly certain they wanted that “combo” to also flow into building Lily gauge versus it being passive generation on a timer that requires no input on the part of the player).

I don’t want a complex rotation. I mainly play SGE and WHM now, since my favorite iteration of AST died when SB ended and I’m a travesty at SCH. But I would be satisfied with a second DoT on a different timer to upkeep. SGE has Phlegma to at least break up the Dosis monotony, but WHM… I go auto-pilot all the time on that job. But if they were to re-introduce Aero III (or I guess they can call it Dia IV or whatever they want) as an 18s or 24s DoT to manage alongside my other Dia DoT and Glare, personally, I’d feel pretty happy and think that’s at least a step in the right direction.



I don’t think it’s good design when a role spends 80% or more of its casts on a single nuke in any given content (Savage and Ultimate included—healers are not spending the majority of their casts on healing in there; they are spending them on their DPS spells). I’m not asking to strictly become a healbot either where I just stand around and wait for people to take damage. But if the developers are insistent on bloating healer toolkits with more healing abilities, then they need to give healers a reason to make use of them (outside of the odd DF party in a 24-man where everyone is dying to everything—fun and engagement in a role shouldn’t hinge on fishing for 24-man meme parties). I feel like a healthy balance of healing and damage dealing is what the role needs. Maybe not 50/50, but even if it was 60% damage/40% healing uptime, that would help with increased engagement.

Or (and this is a very unpopular opinion here), give me back Cleric Stance if there’s going to be so little healing and all I have is my nuke. At least then I have the stance-dancing mechanic and need to know when it’s okay to be in it, and when I need to toggle out of it to prep healing. But I was also one of the few that enjoyed the Cleric Stance dancing and was sad when it went away. Anyways…


I haven’t participated in healer discussions on here since 2022. But what little I’ve read during my sporadic visits to the forums seems largely unchanged from what most healers were asking for during the time I was active on the healer forums (2017~2022). This post is just a collection of unorganized thoughts that I wrote without much thought going into formatting them. If they’re a bit hard to follow, then I apologize. I was merely writing down everything that came to mind when I read the title of the thread.

[Genoreaper]

Healing should be more engaging. Dps has complexity, (well did before this xpac)

Tank had complexity before tank stances took over, back when they had to juggle aggro combo.

Healing should be engaging and i think that the biggest culprit is the design choice of needing them to dps during dungeons and such. It isn't adding to anyone enjoyment.

If red mages were in here demanding more complex healing designs instead of a rez and vercure everyone would agree that's silly because it's not their main role. Healers should be able to splash in damage during rare stretches but not need to heal so rarely that they are considered green dps.

This weird homogeneous stance where everyone is considered dps just leaves everyone unhappy. I know the comparison is taboo but healing in "the other" mmo is engaging, has different styles than "pure heal and shield heal" they feel unique and their kits are useful in different scenarios even if one might slightly be better than the other based on individual dungeon or raid design.

This is all made worse by SE refusing for multiple xpacs to fix warrior. Making healers needed even less since they can just do great dps, have tank hp and mits, and heals. That class might as well play this game as a single player rpg. It is the holy trinity in one. As much salt as blm got for being special pet class of yoshi, (which has now been banished by a new caster that is easier, less strict, hits harder, isn't punished by mechanics, has a heal, a buff. Ect even has the hammer as a ranged spell that's 3 instants over 1k potency and all your motifs are instant castable by a swift cast every 40 seconds in combat and always instant between pulls) war is somehow covering all 3 roles

[Sebazy]

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?

Many people are noticing the fact we have a single button or two to press for a large portion of the fight (for damage) and apparently the solution to that is to make it more complex instead. I think the real solution is fixing the fact we have so much down-time where we're just expected to damage.

A lot of hard content can be done with a single healer despite having two, meaning a lot of content has double the healers it actually requires. I feel like this shows healing itself needs to become more difficult, perhaps with actual 'rotations' given to healing itself or more difficult encounters.

It wont be enjoyable when players taking avoidable damage becomes a frustration for healers because we now need to take time away from our damage rotations. We have enough unique damage jobs in the game that a healer shouldn't be furthered into being another damage job with some slight sustain and healing capabilities.

This issue has been covered a lot and it's not really as simple as just removing downtime unfortunately.

First off, we have so much oGCD potency now that you really have to push HPS requirements an order of magnitude higher than they currently are to actually start eating into our GCDs. Case in point, compare logs between something casual like a 24 man and the average Savage. A decent healer is still going to be funnelling a painful amount of their GCDs into the glare spam in Savage. So how far do you think the healing requirements are going to have to be pushed to actually change that?

Secondly, our MP economy is actually pretty horrible and has been for a few expansions now. The reason it's generally not an issue is because we shouldn't be dipping into our GCDs with their MP costs very often. Healing doesn't generally run you OOM, it's raising that gets you typically.

Thirdly, the design of our healing kit is just as idiotic as our 'dps kit'. I've been saying that SE's job design team are completely clueless with regards to actual quality healer design for years and every expansion just reinforces my stance. Honestly at this stage it's legitimately laughable how embarrassingly rubbish they are.

Don't believe me?

Compare Medica II and Cure II on a single target for both overall potency per cast as well as efficiency. Now think about how frequently you see a typical casual content boss actually cast something that's going to hit the rest of the group.

Healing in this game is a dead end and will remain as such until either Yoshida resigns (perhaps) and/or the job design team gets a new member that actually understands and takes an active interest in healer gameplay.

*Edit*

For clarities sake, IMHO there are several routes to solve this, DPS isn't and shouldn't be the only solution here. In the past I've proposed that AST get draw on the GCD when they were out of charges, allowing them to brute force the RNG by throwing cards instead of Malefics. Allow them to spend time thinking about building the card wombo combos of old rather than trying not to fall asleep between burst windows. SCH used to have an amazing micro management mini game going between juggling two completely distinct GCDs as well as min maxing a much more potent fairy kit. Why did that have to go? (Spoiler: because SE were too inept to ever have a hope of balancing it). Etcetc. Give us proper triage rather than aoe heals that are so powerful and efficient that we rarely need to bother patch healing anything. Give us the occasional bit of attrition where we actually have to fight to keep someone alive rather than them just getting 1 shot after a few mistakes. Give us buffs, give us debuffs, give us ANYTHING that isn't literally pounding the RGB LEDs in our glare keys to death.

[PercibelTheren]

Personally, not neccessarily. I want healers to be engaging, I don't really care which route is taken to get them there. More healing required? Awesome. A DPS rotation? Why not? More healer specific mechanics? Yeah, I'll take them. Giving healers a gimmick to juggle that's neither DPS nor healing and has more to do with buffs or debuffs? That's what drew me to Astrologian before they reworked it for Dawntrail.

[bitofabother]

Yeah. Either more interesting healing or more interesting damage, but something needs to exist to ... be something to do. Especially after the DT AST rework.

[ty_taurus]

I would like a healer that has a soft caster rotation. That's a playstyle I want to see explored properly.