Why don't we have more DPS abilities ?

[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?