Do healers actually want a more complex damage rotation?

[flowerkatie]

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.

[Tunda]

Healer don't heed complex dps rotation..
They need complex kit.
Complex kit will make job unique.. that give u experience no job will be same (not like what we see now with healers)

I agree that game should be easy to play easy to understand but hard to master..

Example black mage or ninja

[Sani2341]

It depends.
And is a very subjective thing even for those healers unhappy with the state of the role atm.

I personaly think at least one of the Healers could have their complexity in their damage Kit. Letting SGE DoTs stack would have been a small first step in that direction for example. Though I personaly would much rather see SCH's DoTs and bane from back in SB being returned to them.

That Said, there's defenitly also an audience for a healer where the complexity lies in interactions within the healing kit.

We have 4 healer jobs, they could serve to cater to more than 1 Playstyle. At least until DT AST had some uniqueness with the card oGCD buffs. But that's gone now in favor of our second 'ripoff aetherflow '

[Rozeee]

I want to do literally anything. I'm not healing because EW tanks exist. I'm not outputting high damage because I'm a healer. I'm not having fun DPS-ing because it's just 1 button spam.

Literally anything.

[flowerkatie]

I want to do literally anything. I'm not healing because EW tanks exist. I'm not outputting high damage because I'm a healer. I'm not having fun DPS-ing because it's just 1 button spam.

Literally anything.

Although I don't agree with the damage side cause we have 13 other jobs to choose from if we want complex DPS rotations and damage, I do think healing needs to be more difficult and actually be required for most content.

[Lambdafish]

Although I don't agree with the damage side cause we have 13 other jobs to choose from if we want complex DPS rotations and damage, I do think healing needs to be more difficult and actually be required for most content.

Did you actually respond to valid criticism of a role with "There are other jobs to choose from"? Healers aren't asking for their focus to be dealing damage, they are asking that if SE is going to give them no reason to heal, then the fallback damage they are inevitably spending 70% of their time doing should be as engaging as other roles.

[flowerkatie]

Did you actually respond to valid criticism of a role with "There are other jobs to choose from"? Healers aren't asking for their focus to be dealing damage, they are asking that if SE is going to give them no reason to heal, then the fallback damage they are inevitably spending 70% of their time doing should be as engaging as other roles.

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.

[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.

[KisaiTenshi]

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.

The focus MUST be on healing. Not damage rotations. The minute you have a "damage rotation" it's no longer a healer, and someone tasked with healing will neglect the healing job because "but muh DPS!"

Like I would be completely happy with the entire GCD DPS kit disappearing under party play. But I don't want to be stuck with nothing to do. Spamming healing uselessly just leads to the problem we already have where the developers think we're pressing medica/M2/M3 every 2 seconds to keep the party alive, when by the time the gear creep catches up, the party doesn't take enough damage to justify that. There is quite literately "too much healing kit, not enough reason to use it."

Two things remain true in DT, that have been true ever since the introduction of the NPC squad.
- You as the healer can tell the NPC's to run into battle, and then you can sit back and drink your tea while they don't need you at all.
- The NPC's combat scripts are "too perfect", so when you get to a boss fight all you have to do is follow one of the DPS. Forget doing anything at all. The only way you can KO Y'shtola or Alisae in a boss fight is by intentionally running a "meteor" marker on top of them instead of spreading out. Something I will add, Krile keeps doing.

Now, not EVERY fight you can get away with it, but you can pretty much pick any NPC trust enabled fight and just use the DPS kit and likely the tank will survive anyway. That's genuinely concerning because it means the developers made the SAME assumption that everyone is just using the healer role as a green DPS.

[Zaytex]

Although I don't agree with the damage side cause we have 13 other jobs to choose from if we want complex DPS rotations and damage, I do think healing needs to be more difficult and actually be required for most content.

I don't understand this line of thinking at all, people will say this for healers and then in the same breath defend tanks when anybody asks to simplify their damage buttons sarcastically. Encounter design in FF14 is very scripted and fixed, the party is not taking damage at every second of an encounter. Some mechanics if done properly do not even damage the party as well, so inevitably, there is always going to be downtime for healing in this game for any piece of content. Yet, what do healers get to do during that downtime? You mash one button and refresh a DoT every 30 seconds, whipeee. Tanks get to have an entire DPS rotation for themselves when they have downtime in their tanking responsibilities, why are they different from healers?

This doesn't even consider how optimal healer gameplay is to use every GCD for your one damage spell, and to complete all healing requirements with OCD's - so even if the piece of content you're doing is healer intensive or engaging, it will still feel awful because you are repeatedly mashing one button and weaving in OGCD heals in-between. The only time this differs is during high-end prog when the healing requirements are intensive, but also new, so you have to actually think about your cooldowns and how they interact with the damage profiles. But once you've learned it, you go back to square one of boredom.

Lastly, healers are not just healers, just like how tanks are not just tanks. They are both casters and melee DPS, because every job in this game is expected to do damage at all times barring some responsibilities - you would never clear on patch high end content if your healers were not casting DPS, because the system has baked healer DPS into the algorithm when creating enrage/dps checks.

Which brings me to this: If healers have downtime in their healing responsibilities, and if all of their optimal healing is placed on the OGCD, and if they're expected to DPS at all times in order to beat DPS checks with their parties... then why is my DPS rotation just one button? You simply cannot excuse this unacceptable job design, and if you try, I can just circle it back to tanks. Which at that point, you'd have agree in the notion of gutting tanks to being the same one-button DPS rotation with the rest of their toolkit being exclusively for holding aggro or giving mitigations.

So yeah, the whole ''healers are supposed to heal, and not have complex DPS rotations'' is just people not understanding this game very well (no offense).