Why don't we have more DPS abilities ?

[Azurarok]

A little unrelated, and not that I really trust them to replace them with something effective, but other than so we have *something* else to optimize, do we even need the DoTs at this point? I feel they were designed around Cleric Stance (and fester for SCH?) and just kinda lost their usefulness over the changes starting with SB. WHM and AST also don't have them in PvP now and yet they still feel better to play as well. Think the mobile version also just got rid of them outright.

At least with Aero/Bio/Combust, their having been 18s made them barely a gain over 1, so I think it was more reasonable to use them more for movement, like purposefully delay refreshing by a few seconds so you can move and avoid dropping a casted spell. Them being 30s makes them less useful for that, with the 1.5s glare/broil pushing it further.

[Connor]

A little unrelated, and not that I really trust them to replace them with something effective, but other than so we have *something* else to optimize, do we even need the DoTs at this point? I feel they were designed around Cleric Stance (and fester for SCH?) and just kinda lost their usefulness over the changes starting with SB. WHM and AST also don't have them in PvP now and yet they still feel better to play as well. Think the mobile version also just got rid of them outright.

At least with Aero/Bio/Combust, their having been 18s made them barely a gain over 1, so I think it was more reasonable to use them more for movement, like purposefully delay refreshing by a few seconds so you can move and avoid dropping a casted spell. Them being 30s makes them less useful for that, with the 1.5s glare/broil pushing it further.

Fester was a Summoner ability when it had the DoT interaction thing. Scholar did get Bane though which spread the DoTs to nearby enemies which was a pretty big part of the job for many people. They’re fairly easy to mix up too though lol

I feel like the DoTs are something that much better on paper than in practice. Like, it’s a nice idea, ‘healers that aren’t as comfortable with dps can just throw up a DoT every now and then and focus on healing as opposed to optimising filler spells or whatever.
Naturally though, that really isn’t how they work in theory because DoTs simply don’t make up that much of a healer’s overall output compared to the filler spell for just using them to ever be viable. At least I think they don’t? Not to mention overabundance of oGCD healing etc.

Whether DoTs can/should go I think is more of a case-by-case thing though. Like, for White Mage I could see them not having one since it’s mostly about high potency attacks anyway like Afflatus. Or Astrologian not having one since it’s more party dps oriented than personal anyway. Scholar is usually the most popular healer considered for being the ‘DoT master’ given how it was before. And lastly Sage, which honestly I’m not sure about. Maybe they could keep the one single / one aoe DoT but make them stack?

[Azurarok]

Fester was a Summoner ability when it had the DoT interaction thing. Scholar did get Bane though which spread the DoTs to nearby enemies which was a pretty big part of the job for many people. They’re fairly easy to mix up too though lol

Oh right, forgot about Bane somehow. I've wondered if it did have fester in the past but guess not, then.

I feel like the DoTs are something that much better on paper than in practice. Like, it’s a nice idea, ‘healers that aren’t as comfortable with dps can just throw up a DoT every now and then and focus on healing as opposed to optimising filler spells or whatever.
Naturally though, that really isn’t how they work in theory because DoTs simply don’t make up that much of a healer’s overall output compared to the filler spell for just using them to ever be viable. At least I think they don’t? Not to mention overabundance of oGCD healing etc.

Whether DoTs can/should go I think is more of a case-by-case thing though. Like, for White Mage I could see them not having one since it’s mostly about high potency attacks anyway like Afflatus. Or Astrologian not having one since it’s more party dps oriented than personal anyway. Scholar is usually the most popular healer considered for being the ‘DoT master’ given how it was before. And lastly Sage, which honestly I’m not sure about. Maybe they could keep the one single / one aoe DoT but make them stack

Optimization also ends up pressuring players to keep them refreshed consistently, which I've noticed is something not everyone likes to have to track. That said, I agree it should be by the job too. Give people who enjoy that kinda stuff a space for it, we have 4 jobs after all. It'd help dehomogenize the role too.

[Shurrikhan]

Fester was a Summoner ability when it had the DoT interaction thing. Scholar did get Bane though which spread the DoTs to nearby enemies which was a pretty big part of the job for many people. They’re fairly easy to mix up too though lol

What's funny is both essentially should have just been Arcanist abilities, allowing Summoner to focus on leveraging its summons for damage and/or pseudo-tanking post-split while Scholar focused on Galvanize its decently different form of supplementation / complementation via its summons.

I feel like the DoTs are something that much better on paper than in practice. Like, it’s a nice idea, ‘healers that aren’t as comfortable with dps can just throw up a DoT every now and then and focus on healing as opposed to optimising filler spells or whatever.
Naturally though, that really isn’t how they work in theory because DoTs simply don’t make up that much of a healer’s overall output compared to the filler spell for just using them to ever be viable. At least I think they don’t? Not to mention overabundance of oGCD healing etc.

Well, they're effectively soft-CDs with an additional free charge per enemy as a cleave mechanic (though eventually surpassed by AoE spam, if any, especially without something like Bane), and additional TTK consideration.

Imagine an instant-cast attack that does 30% of filler damage baseline, but charges over 30 seconds since last use to deal an extra 220% damage, eventually doing 2.4x filler damage. Optimally, then, you'd use it every 30 seconds. By doing so, you get an extra 3 fillers of damage per minute, or a 12.5% damage increase. However, you could also toss one in earlier for uptime when you'd otherwise have no other useful instant-cast option, can snapshot one in early to take advantage of raidbuffs even if desynced, etc.

That's in essence our 30s DoTs.

...Except (A) the snapshotting early doesn't actually hurt the (new) DoT since it's already fully charged (and the previous one is all that would be hurt), and (B) the actual DoTs can also get that damage bonus per target, giving better AoE scaling up to the point where it's surpassed by straight AoE spam and/or the victim's TTK falls too low. So they're a tad more interesting than the soft-CD.

They're a high bang-for-buck system. They're just hard to notice because they're now so infrequent. Compare the current 2 casts per 60s of Dia on a WHM now, for instance, with the 6 Aero IIs, 3.33 Aeros, and 2.5 Aero IIIs per minute for roughly 12 DoT casts per minute on a Heavensward White Mage. Even assuming zero GCD heals, which was far less frequent back then, filler attacks could only count for half of one's attacks. With even just a quarter of uptime spent on heals, the filler attack would likewise be just a quarter of uptime. After all, WHM had 4 attacks useful in ST combat even with without using any CC (used per *|12|18|24s), whereas now there are only 3 (used per *|30|60s).

[Carighan]

I feel they could do a lot with extremely simple changes not requiring extra buttons, though. I mentioned this before, but a simple thing I'd do is rework the existing DPS space to accomodate unique per-healer damage profiles:

* Sage can hold down Dosis: After the initial cast that works as-now, the lasers begin rapid-firing as long as the button is held, one-by-one, one every 0.5s at first, over 6s this accelerates to one every 0.25s. Each laser causes 25% of the normal damage, 25% of the normal Kardia healing and costs 25% of the normal mana. They fire as long as you can hold them down. This is a 20% increase at first, rising to a 150% increase as they accelerate.
* Scholar can swap their fairy between a healing and a DPS mode. Tether becomes a very strong DoT in this mode while 10 energy is gained with each nuke cast. While fairy is tethered to an enemy, your DoT button turns into a carbon-copy of it you can also channel at the same target, doubling the already high damage.
* Astro's nuke becomes a 1-2-3 autocombo. Each #3 "waxes" the moon in the UI element of Astros. The more full it is, the faster GCD heals cast but the less they heal, while GCD nukes become slower but stronger. Each GCD heal cast "wanes" the moon, with opposing effects. Total output entirely unaffected, but speed vs power of each cast changes continuously so there's no reliable cadence (fits Astro IMO, dunno).
* White Mage loses their nuke, replaced by another very short and kinda weak DoT (5s or so) that is channeled. While this DoT ticks (once per second), it also tries to bleed one tick (3s) off of all other DoTs applied by this player, accelerating them to deal more damage faster. Several other abilities are now DoTs with overly long durations to make space to accelerate them: Assize applies a 60s DoT instead of direct damage, Afflatus Misery still an area nuke but weaker but applies a 120s DoT, Glare IV weaker but applies 15s per cast (duration stacks) of a DoT, too. So in total you can stack up to 4 concurrent DoTs, while spamming your channeled DoT to accelerate them and deal high per-second damage.

[Shurrikhan]

@Carighan

The WHM effect seems out of place to me (more Arcanist than CNJ or WHM), but I like the diversification. The AST effect seems especially interesting -- though note that the global recast time would also have to be affected, not just the cast time, for wax and wane to have the same outputs, and despite the thematic flavor there probably isn't much to optimize until we get a lot more opportunity for chained non-emergency GCD heals at the least.

[Carighan]

The WHM effect seems out of place to me (more Arcanist than CNJ or WHM), but I like the diversification. The AST effect seems especially interesting -- though note that the global recast time would also have to be affected, not just the cast time, for wax and wane to have the same outputs, and despite the thematic flavor there probably isn't much to optimize until we get a lot more opportunity for chained non-emergency GCD heals at the least.

Oh that's a good point, I should have mentioned it affects the induced GCD by an equivalent amount, too. And yeah that waxing/waning would mostly be for flavor, not optimisation. I'd love some optimization in it, but encounter design would have to change for that to be realistic.

[Naoki34]

Hello guys.

As a WHM player, I'm wondering why most of our DPS comes from spells ?

I means, if ~40% of our DPS came from spells and ~60% from short CD abilities (4 or 5 sec cooldown), we would prioritize healing spells over healing abilities when healing are required.

That way, it would be the occasion to bring back earth/wind/water to WHM while keeping light spells we have now. And we would have a more complex DPS rotation.

Ah, you must not be aware that the vast majority of Healers don't want to Dps, and as they complained to Yoshi-P, he decreed that all Healers would have just enough to defend themselves in MSQ.
Because when it comes down to it, we all do as we please, but the rules go for the majority, and in general, this forum, which should rather be called “The Complaints Office”, is populated by the noisy minority. Yes, that's democracy too...

Peace to all Healers who shouted: You don't pay my sub!
And who got more of the same in response.

[Mondodo]

Ironically the MSQ is one of the greatest reasons why healers need to get more interesting ways to do damage. Both me and my friend tried to be the healer as we went through the MSQ for the first time and although we got fast queues it wasn't worth it because the experience of trying to do the solo duties as healer was just dull as dishwater. It was fine until disciple of magic gear split for me at least because I played SMN/SCH but I don't know how this game is realistically going to get more people interested in healing if it's going to take twice as long to do a solo boss fight as healer than it is to do so as a DPS. It makes Healer something that relies on the player wanting to go back at max level and level a healer, rather than a fresh new player going through the game as a healer and enjoying themselves from day one.

A new DPS spell or two for each job would do wonders to alleviate this problem I think, as well as an increase in DPS for healers in solo duties in the MSQ. They could also some shoring up of WHM/SGE identities to either give them some utility or make their damage shine more as something as valuable as SCH/AST utility.

[Sunhwapark]

They could probably just make the primary spell rotate through 3 animations per cast for some visual diversity - kind of like what they did to with DRK's Bloodspiller under the effect of Delirium.