Sage

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Originally Posted by Saefinn

So I am seeing things that make me a little excited to see what happens. But until I see it in action, see how everything works in practice and maybe get to play it, I can't shake that cautiousness.

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As much as I am excited for Sage's kit, I'm also cautiously skeptical about healer designs above 6.0. Now they have acknowledged Green DPS, what are they going to do with the other 3 jobs to make them balanced and varied at the same time?

Imo SE should advance the other 3 healers "a bit" towards Sage's design and strike for a 50/50 heal/DPS balance. Gimmicks that link the healing skills with damage skills are great designs.

If they revert Sage in 7.0 back to spamming 1 DPS skill along with the rest of the healers I'll be extremely disappointed. If they abandon the Green DPS design and make healers spend 90% of their time healing instead, that's an immediate uninstall for me.

I wouldn't mind spending 90% of the time healing if the game were designed for it... which is not. Tanks and healers are essentially just dps with support abilities and it's past time they acknowledge that.

The return of Lord and Lady was a welcoming surprise though, since I always thought we could use more spells like Assize that are both healing and offensive - the devs want us to focus on healing, lots of us want to deal damage because there's not enough healing to be done, por que no los dos?

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Originally Posted by Allegor

I wouldn't mind spending 90% of the time healing if the game were designed for it... which is not. Tanks and healers are essentially just dps with support abilities and it's past time they acknowledge that.

The return of Lord and Lady was a welcoming surprise though, since I always thought we could use more spells like Assize that are both healing and offensive - the devs want us to focus on healing, lots of us want to deal damage because there's not enough healing to be done, por que no los dos?

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Totally respect your personal preference. One thing to watch out for though is when devs start removing/downgrading DPS abilities from healers, and render the role useless outside of an instance (aka curebot). I think that is bad for the game's health no matter what.

More healing could be achieved by encounter designs while maintaining healers' "damage potential". Or like you suggested, more skills that do both.

I'm going to do scholar first for endwalker because by god I have done so for the past several expansions and I'm not going to stop now. Then I'll try sage afterwards.

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Originally Posted by Brandedblade

I'm going to do scholar first for endwalker because by god I have done so for the past several expansions and I'm not going to stop now. Then I'll try sage afterwards.

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You are stronger than I.

Personally, i dont have any high hopes for the kit being actually any good aside from the fact that Sage has a Gap Closer.

If Squeenix Job design taught me anything about them, then it is the fact that theyre just making Jobs within the same role more and more the same, so if Sage will be similar to SCH just "newer", then i might as well resign my hopes today already.

Sage and AST both lookin spicy imo.

WHM and SCH are kind of meh. Holy 2 looks nice.

It'll be nice to finally have a new healer to play after all this time. I just hope it doesn't suffer from the problem AST had when it came out of potencies and MP regens being way too low. I still remember needing to pour literally everything i had into double pulls back in the day to keep the tank alive. If a dps was taking unnecessary damage they were dead.

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Originally Posted by Averax

Sage and AST both lookin spicy imo.

WHM and SCH are kind of meh. Holy 2 looks nice.

It'll be nice to finally have a new healer to play after all this time. I just hope it doesn't suffer from the problem AST had when it came out of potencies and MP regens being way too low. I still remember needing to pour literally everything i had into double pulls back in the day to keep the tank alive. If a dps was taking unnecessary damage they were dead.

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I feel this. To me, I get the vibe that WHM and SCH are being thrown under the bus in order for AST and SGE to shine (WHM less so than SCH, but its still basically being ignored in the grand scheme of things).

WHM's new totem action has a lot of potential to be interesting, but it doesn't seem that any of WHM's issues are being addressed other than weaving. Holy II seems like it might have some potential outside of AoE based on its interactions with the new totem, but generating lilies without creating new ways to spend them seems like they completely wiffed on the core design flaws of the lily system. While it has so much potential, I'm legitimately gobsmacked they supposedly did nothing to build from the foundation they created in Shadowbringers. What's more, since Glare now has a 1.5 second cast time, the current solution of using lilies to weave is now largely obsolete, meaning it will be even harder to spend lilies outside of savage/ultimate prog. Mobility-dense segments might still encourage their use, but WHM doesn't have enough OGCD actions to warrant sacking your DPS for a double weave window. Also who knows if Afflatus Misery's potency is at least getting buffed to keep up with Glare II, though I'm honestly doubtful that it will, meaning afflatus heals become an even worse DPS loss. There's a lot underdetermined in regards to specifics like potencies, but what we've seen so far doesn't inspire confidence. Let's pray the media tour makes me eat my words.

To be honest, I'm kind of hoping SCH crashes and burns. It sucks to say, and I don't want SCH players to be unhappy, but sometimes you need a colossal failure in order to slap the design team awake to the fact that SCH feels like a hollow husk of what it used to be, potencies and efficiency be damned. It's sloppy, it has no cohesiveness, the Fey Gauge is a joke, and it's not even a very good "barrier healer" outside of Savage/Ultimate where Adlo and Succor actually become tactically useful tools for certain mechanics. If we want to talk about "not inspiring confidence," I don't think there's a worse way to lead off a job's design philosophy than how they introduced SCH's slide during the live letter. "We don't know what to do with it." The sad thing is, I'm willing to bet it will still be a top-performing healer despite its dumpster fire kit.

Meanwhile, AST is looking to have a lot of cool new toys to play with. Some players are complaining that WHM's totem is just Earthly Star and the new "Starshower" action is just Assize, but I disagree. At a glance at least, there's a bit more nuance to them and potentially different effects. The new/old Lord and Lady are looking a lot better, both not consuming an existing arcanum card alongside their effects. I think it will come down to how you acquire either. If they're random again, I'd say that would be not ideal, though if that have charges now then you can at least sit on the Lady and wait for a good time to use her for at least a little while. They didn't mention the card effects so it's possible they're staying the same. I know that doesn't sound great to a lot of players, but depending on how the new seal system operates, it could be possible that card identity might actually come into play moreso with how those seal combos work. It could, in theory, indirectly give the cards identity into which seals they have and what benefits those grant you. It's really hard to say for sure since we don't have any specifics, but I'm a bit more optimistic than I am for WHM and SCH. Now here's to hoping Sleeve Draw feels better than Shadowbringers.

SGE meanwhile is stealing the show. Lots of really well-designed actions from the look of things. Icarus, Pneuma, Phlegma, Eucrasia, Cardia... It seems like, for the first time literally ever, that they're actually looking at the contrast between GCD DPS potency and contrasting that value against some of your other GCD options and trying to actually incentivize us to do other things over spamming Dosis all the time. One of the things that I found agonizing about the designers' approach to healing was that they clearly wanted us to DPS less but without increasing damage output or creating incentives behind other GCD options to make us want to stop. Now they are, and if they can latch onto that like a tick and suck that concept dry, we could be in for more positive changes in the future. I was initially disappointed in Toxicon II's implementation from what we've been able to translate from the demonstration, but as others have pointed out, it's likely that the DPS action we didn't see during the last live letter that Alphinaud uses 3 times during the benchmark is likely a single target Adder's Sting/Serpent's Fang (whatever it's called) spender. If gaining those stacks is indeed gained from our SGE Adlo being attacked/broken, at that's at least DPS neutral, that we'll have accomplished more than I had ever hoped for in regards to healers. Sure, they might be blatantly stealing from Blackest Night, but I'm certainly not complaining.

All-in-all, I really kind of hope that AST and SGE pop off and WHM/SCH numbers plummet. I really don't want those mains to feel like their job is ruined, but sometimes you need to burn down what's broken to create fertile land for something new and fresh to come in, and that might be exactly what we need in order for the designers to see what we want in our healers. I mentioned this before, but we obviously don't have the specifics on each job yet, and that ultimately means there's more that we don't know than what we do. For all we know, everything I said is hilariously inaccurate, but we'll just have to wait and see I suppose. Fingers crossed people.

Personally I play healer mainly for raiding, so I play whichever has the best gameplay and is most effective. At the moment that's AST for me, simply because it's the best healer and the higher APM, weave, wide oGCD toolkit and mobility make it more enjoyable than clip mage or being held back by clunky fairy AI. Healer class fantasy just doesn't appeal to me that much. Due to that, I have no idea which I'll main. I know it's unlikely to be SCH while the fairy is a thing, but otherwise I want to see the full toolkit and overall gameplay of the other 3. I will likely level all healers anyway.

I'm excited for Sage, to be honest.

You know what I'm not excited for?

Raiders to get ahold of it. For some reason I can't quite describe, it already disappoints me that videos are already being made, talking about 'meta' and 'optimal rotations'.
What I'm not excited for, is for them to get a hold of it and start whining that it's 'tOo cOmPlICaTeD' or something of some such nature, and for them to beg for Sage to be dumbed down and simplified.
I want this complexity I'm seeing. I WANT this level of thought in a kit.


Astrologian used to have complexity too. But then (as I was told a few years ago. I could very much be wrong, and I acknowledge that), the high-tier raiders started whining about the card system (More than just 'The Balance' was useful. I mean c'mon), and look what happened. The card system was.... butchered and mangled into an incredibly bland, simplified dumbed down system of.. 'Oh boy! Attack cards.. and... more attack cards.... and just... an extra 3% damage.. oh yaaaaay...'. Royal Road? Gone. The other card abilities? Vanished.

I just pray to Thaliak that high-tier content players just.. leave this class be. PLEASE, ALLOW A JOB TO BE FUN AND INTERESTING.
Also yes, I am still incredibly salty and bitter about this. My post is ssomewhat emotionally-charged because I honestly loved Astrologian until the card system was destroyed.