Yeah it would be a completely different game and they would never do it, I was just explaining what would be required to manage difficulty without it spiking uncontrollably.
I miss making clutch plays with tier 1 gcds because healing was more intense, mana management was much more important, and there were less strong OGCDs. ShB kinda killed it. now something like physick is only good for if you have no aetherflow and its too late to adlo (shield will get ignored) or emergency adlo
With how WHM basically has infinite mana due to always keeping their mana regen skills on cooldown (Assize is for DPS and mana, not heals), there's no point in Cure 1 NOT becoming Cure 2 as soon as Cure 2 is granted. That change would help A LOT of WHMs become better as Cure 1 is basically pointless, and the mechanic is one that should really be ignored rather than used.
I'd like to see long cd's (1 min) on aoe GCD heals if only to see the healbots completely lost when they can't spam Medica II and Succor :p
To be fair, WHM mana management is fairly poor around where Cure II is unlocked. They don't get Assize, lilies or Thin Air until after 50. Compare that to AST which has cheaper heals and mana from Draw. It wouldn't hurt to move some mana management to below 50 and/or lower the cost of GCD heals.
For WHM, just reverse Freecure.
Have Cure 2 proc Freecure, which increases the potency of Cure 1 and reduces it's cast time. You then save MP by using a more powerful Cure 1 instead of your usual Cure 2.
I'd like to see Stone/Glare/Holy or Aero/Dia ticks proc freecure and with a longer duration so you can stock it for when it's needed. Reward dealing damage with strong free heals.
If we had a mechanic where a Cure 2 cast made the next Cure 1 heal at 700 potency (and I'd like it OGCD and insta cast), I would be fine with that change to the Free Cure mechanic as it'd allow Cure 1 to become relevant again - especially when you need to push out the single target HPS (like when you have a LARP tank that's wearing a bathrobe covered in tin foil as "armor".) What would be nice with that is also if the Free Cure Cure 1 also sprouted a lily.
On the subject of Cure 3, that's not actually a worthless heal as it's actually a good one to use if you can get the timing right on the stack mechanics where it goes off shortly after the damage is dealt, so everyone gets healed. Yeah, it's not OGCD, but it also allows you to conserve the lilies if doing so makes sense for the encounter. It's really more of a situational heal but I don't consider it a bad one by any stretch.
Medica 1 is fine, it's the same potency as Afflatus Rapture, just 5y less (300). Cure 3 has a potency of 550, which is the highest AoE heal that the WHM has in their toolkit. Assize is second at 400... but I use Assize more for mana and DPS as it's always on cooldown, I generally consider Assize healing as a nice bonus. And for reference, Medica 2 has a 200 base heal with a 100 regen, while Asylum is a 100 potency but it gives everyone in the Asylum +10% HP recovery as the Asylum buff. Temperance is a +20% increase to healing potency with a -10% damage reduction buff.
Rather than getting rid of Freecure why not upgrade it to Freecure II, something like, idk, casting Cure II has a chance the next Cure II is instant and costs no mp (basically a free lily), or make the next Cure spell grant a blood lily charge as if you used a lily
I think the point is that if you gave Cure 3 Medica 1's range, Medica 1 would be useless and I'd be completely fine with that.
The two spells don't need to exist together. Have Medica 1 trait into Medica 3. Let the Cure Spells be for Single Target, and the Medica Spells be for AoE and call it a day.
Whatever changes they make to the tier 1 cure spells or the Freecure passive, my (vain) hope is that they make said changes with skillful gameplay in mind. A question to ask when designing something is, "what gameplay is this ability encouraging?" There are generally two good answers to this question: you either guide the player toward skill expression or your provide a safety net against poor skill expression. Stormblood lilies were horrible for a lot of reasons. One major factor here was that they provided a terrible answer to that question: they encouraged spamming GCD heals. In FFXIV's combat system, this is incredibly poor skill expression. It's a mark of someone who's not using their abilities to the fullest. Furthermore, rather than providing a safety net, they attempted (ineffectively) to put good skill expression behind said poor skill expression. That is, you were encouraged to play badly in order to (presumably) play well. Even though number crunching showed it wasn't worth it, but that's a different matter.
I'm against changing Freecure in any way that doesn't change its answer to the above question. Spamming GCD heals is not a habit to encourage.
To be fair, it's not like WHM has much to work with outside tetra or assize regarding ogcd. The concept of shortening the cooldown of abilities was good on paper, but the main problem was that it basically rewarded overhealing. Had the lilies been tied to stone or aero proccs, however...
It wasn't even nearly as good on paper as it seemed. The Lilies used to reduce the cooldown time of the single next oGCD (not all of them, but a short list of them) by 4, 10, or 20%, depending on how many lilies you had stored up. Contrast this with The Spear card back in Heavensward: it used to reduce ALL of its target's oGCD recast times by 20% for thirty seconds. An Astro throwing an unbuffed-by-Royal-Road spear card at you was directly superior to the most powerful reward your entire job gauge could possibly build to. The Spear was the same card that was widely considered to be so worthless that it was eventually changed into a crit buff. So it wasn't just inferior to a single AST card, it was inferior to the worst AST card. Even if you tied it to Stone and Aero, it needed a hell of a lot better return of investment to not look totally pathetic next to anything Astro could throw out.
That's why I'm looking at Free Cure reinvented into a mechanic that (on Cure 2 cast) basically turns Cure 1 into Tet. When you need to generate a ton of HPS, that's a good way to utilize a skill that's not getting utilized. However... the better thing to do is simply delete Free Cure (it may have been good years ago, it needs to go now), upgrade Cure 1 into Cure 2 via trait when you would unlock Cure 2.
Cure II spam is not sustainable at lower levels [unless your tank is really good or you're playing the 'how low can their HP get' game], the only way to get rid of Cure I would be to give them either Solace or Tetra at about lv 35-40, not only because of the increased mp cost but because Cure II would be literally their only single target heal.
Freecure is a trait that's meant to help while leveling/sync down, so rather than removing it because it becomes redundant at higher levels, I think it's best to upgrade it into something useful like any other trait would.
Freecure is trash, yes, but it's useful trash for synced content, as I've said before. Unless you want to make mentor roulette impossible for WHM - I like trying to carry newbies when they try, so no, I will not drop Corpse Hall when I get it on the roulette. No, I won't just play Astro either.
A common critique of SE's job design is that older jobs get really bad kits when synched. Just deleting freecure and upgrading cure just makes 50 WHM go from bad to terrible.
Change it, sure, but the level cap is not the entire game.
How about making it encourage the use of DPS spells instead?
I posted this elsewhere, but I'll put it up here:
Cure: Restores Target’s HP. Cure Potency: 450. 1.5s Cast Time. 400 MP.
Additional Effect: Cleric Stance: Increases the potency of the next Stone, Glare, or Holy you cast by 50% while reducing its cast time by 2.5s. Duration: 15s.
The intent here was to get you to use Cure for movement and a touch of healing while offsetting the DPS tax of said movement. I'd give this in ARR where it's most needed as well as has its most interesting ramifications. Effectively it's a pre-cursor to Lilies. It's part of a larger rework I've posted elsewhere, and in that it does get phased out, but the gist is there. Compare its use cases to the rest of WHM's kit as it is currently before looking for my rework and you'll see what I mean. It's probably too busted at a guaranteed rate, but it doesn't discourage pure DPS, just excessive healing without forethought.
That's not a bad start. I'd personally also love a damage movement tool that serves the same purpose as Ruin 2 or Malefic's shorter cast time. There are plenty of lower-difficulty content encounters where you don't have to heal at all; WHM as currently designed in those scenarios has feelsbad DoT clipping or overhealing as its movement options. Without a Ruin 2 equivalent, you've still got that problem where uselessly healing an already healthy teammate is the alternative. A list of movement options with different tradeoffs would go a long way toward actual decision-making in the kit.
I recently tried a few Expert roulettes as WHM to see what I'm "missing", and it's a yikes from me. When the tank is actually awake it's just clip clip clip clip clip barf.
To be fair, my rework does add like five different GCDs that do just that in total, including that proc. One is Aero 3, which doubles as an AoE button. Two of them Are Stone/Holy and Rapture or Solace slapped together with an Excog-like trigger heal that are independent from Lilies. The last is a DPS lily, but that works because I turn Misery into a positive gain regardless of how you use Lilies, and Misery then acts as WHM's burst to help it compete with SCH and AST's raid dps cooldowns.
The thing with Lucid is that you've got to save the first usage for when you're like 80% down on mana and then always keep it on cooldown after that point and that will work for most downscaled content. Coming up... yeah it's brutal.
What about changing Fluid Aura to:
- Now OGCD insta cast
- Causes the next skill cause to return you mana (so you go up in mana instead of down)
- Gives you like a +5% potency buff to that skill
That'd work well with the WHM kit and give you the flexibility to use Fluid Aura for either more HPS or DPS with whatever the situation needs.
First, just use Lucid on cooldown from the get go or on your first DoT refresh. Compared to Stormblood Lucid (which had twice the cooldown) it gives 20% more MP, but only if you're using it on cooldown. It's kinda like tank cooldowns: Use proactively or you screw yourself over by the time you need them.
Second, that Fluid Aura change is kinda gross but also really 'eh'? Like, you can use it on a raise and gain 2400 MP, though effectively it's more like 4800 MP. That part's busted. Which means you'd have to restrict it to an actual heal or DPS spell via the potency buff (which doesn't offset the weaving cost), but, really, the problem is the MP cost on WHM's heals in of themselves. Why not simply tune the costs down a bit?
That said, my Cleric Stance proc proposal in a post earlier in this thread (pulled from my rework elsewhere) also offers a partial solution to these MP concerns as well, by offering more MP-efficiency through clever sequencing of spells. When compared against Cure II usage on a target you're not worried about, you save 600 MP and gain 200 potency worth of healing with a [Cure-Stone]x2 sequence while retaining the same DPS that Cure II + Stone x3 has, and that healing can be split amongst two targets, which can potentially save MP as well if you were thinking of using an AoE heal. Every other heal WHM has is still more efficient in some other manner, of course, but this does matter for tank-healing at the levels we're talking about.
Either way, I think the better solution is just to knock off about 200 MP off of Cure II/III and Medica I/II. The changes won't put it as low as Astrologian, but they will be felt nonetheless.
Thank you for stating the obvious on how to use Lucid. The rest of us are now thoroughly reminded of what we already know.
Why not both?
Could you either post it here or stop with the self-promotion?
The thought process put into your posts live up to your signature. As for your questions and concerns, I'll simplify things: No. Already explained it. Go back and read.
The thought process put into your posts live up to your signature. As for your questions and concerns, I'll simplify things: No. Already explained it. Go back and read.
The thought process put into your posts live up to your signature. As for your questions and concerns, I'll simplify things: No. Already explained it. Go back and read.
As expected, your responses are as vapid as always... yet still somehow tend to pull off the elitism angle.
And when it comes to asking for new things, you should always ask for the OP instead of trying to make it "balanced". Balance is a myth (since it doesn't actually exist) and often times what we think of as OP isn't. If the dev team likes the idea, they'll figure out how to make it work with everything else and (tbh) we really shouldn't be doing their jobs because we do not have access to their data so we will (inevitably) do it wrong when we try to balance something that doesn't exist.
Oh good, you can read more than a third of any given response to you. Just confirming that since you tend to ignore damning reasoning for easy jabs. As I expect you will continue to do in the next twenty or so posts like this one.
Balance exists because the meta and gameplay interactions exist. Balance from the developer’s perspective is just about tuning both to facilitate what you want. What I and other players want is healers to have depth, play differently from one another, have a roughly equal presence and/or unique advantages in difficult content, and fit within the constraints of the engine that prevent everything else from happening.
Those are difficult asks, and we sure don’t expect it to happen easily, but we can just as easily say that SE is trying, while also trying to not alienate players like you who can’t handle statistics. In either case, they will ignore trivial posts that offer nothing of value when it comes to feedback.
From that perspective, why would I ever ask for obviously broken garbage that that has zero likelihood to ever get implemented that doesn’t even solve the baseline problems it wants to address? There’s a difference between knowing something and understanding it. In the case of White Mage’s design problems in reference to the above, I’m fairly sure you don’t even have a firm grasp on the first, yet you claim I don’t have the second when I’ve predicted Curing Waltz/Dance Partner and Further Ruin stacks using my own rework ideas in the past.
Ergo, if you want to actually see riffs on your own ideas in game at some point, maybe you should do some research and analysis before posting...well, any suggestions from now on. I could poke holes in them all day, but it wouldn’t change anything unless you tried to improve at something.
Otherwise, to mangle some political YouTubers, you can keep committing to your doxastic anxiety over some internet nerds giving you fair criticism of your design approach, for lack of a better term.
It's a shame that you're the one hyperfixated on this 'elitist' bias instead of actually useful discussion then. It's obvious what I'm doing, and yet you bite every time. And when you respond with some sort of reasonable suggestion I actually give you the reasonable response. Unfortunately for you, the sass will continue until you attempt to make an ability that makes numerical and conceptual sense, or explain why you dislike any one of the 17 bullet point abilities from my rework. No I'm not linking it. I'm not here to self-promote. You can find it yourself. It's not hard to follow a profile link and scroll through post history. If you think that's a big ask cause you're responding to this on mobile, try actually sitting down and making a game of your own sometime, cause it's 90% of why I limit my own suggestions the way I do (It cuts down on development time by a ton!). I'm not interested in these jabs beyond getting you to actually follow through and show anyone who's responded to you (not just me) that you actually comprehend what they're saying, where they're coming from, why they're saying it, and prove them wrong or right via an actual technical example or sufficiently accurate analogy, and then respond to their criticism with actual humility instead of us reenacting the same dril tweet twice.
Failing to make an actual point yet using sophistry to make your vapid, condescending posts seem like they're actually relevant while I keep pointing that out?
It's simple, we don't need to turn WHM into SCH or AST and that's what you're aiming to do.
So did why you (yet again) reference you rework in a thread that it's not posted in? I'm not going to waste my time digging through your post history especially since your too lazy to bring the relevant information here.
Did it ever occur to you that most of your posts can be summed up as...
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/duty_calls.png
Yes? Do you not know what schadenfreude is?
No need to answer, you know what's coming, you do this to yourself.
https://i.imgur.com/mtQu36Z.png