How would you design the DPS kits for each Healer?

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Originally Posted by Ramiee

Bit of a fun post to see how everyone would approach this, I feel like everyone would have different opinions on how a theoretical DPS system for each healer should be handled and im interested to see it.

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I still push this guys ideas. They are not only well thought out but they also use pre existing assets which means they don't need to spend money on development just time on balancing potencies etc...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF3XIhJm_N0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2YZ1dx34ug

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNJGY9B7VW4&t=683s

At an absolute minimum bane and miasma are back.
Miasma can be 21s.
Art of war applies miasmolysis giving it a use in single target (shorter duration higher potency dot ~15s maybe).
Fester effect on broil to incentivise dot upkeep above broilspam.
If possible, make dot timers like storm's eye, but rather than extending to double, just a tick or two leeway.

Potency upgrade on ruin 2 to make it enough that the second weave slot isn't free, but also isn't penalised as heavily if you chuck an energy drain in.
Potency upgrade on energy drain to ~180. MP generation on energy drain so you can get ~3.5-7k back in a hurry in case of death and it was a recoverable mechanic.

Quickened aetherflow is back.
A new button that converts all galvanise into eye for an eye/vengeance style counterhit. Damage type agnostic.
There could also be a spender for the fairy gauge since it usually sits at 100 because onion is rarely necessary. Or have a dh/whatever boost depend on how full it is.

Seraph, fey blessing, fey union all consolidated back into rouse and possible reduction on indom cooldown to compensate.
Baneful impaction is gone because it's not really a dot in the way that whatever gunbreaker's version of circle of scorn isn't really a dot. It's mechanically no different to an x potency attack. I guess they can't direct hit so whatever.

Fever dream bonuses:
Addendum: Black - this temporarily upgrades Broil IV to Fire V and Ruin II to Thunder V and grants astral fire 3 for the duration.
Addendum: White - this temporarily upgrades energy drain to assize - can't really give reraise here, but it'd replace seraphism as the broadly high healing throughput button.
Helices and Modus Veritas (dots and halves dot duration to double potency). For simplicity, 128s duration proteaohelix where the type depends on the current weather; Modus Veritas probably ought to cost an aetherflow per use.

For WHM I would leave it as it is for the people who enjoy a simple DPS rotation. I would change the leveling by adding a downgrade to blood lily early on (50 or 60) and while we are at it make medica 2 lower level because is insane you don't have it by AV. I feel the return of the full cast glare might also be interesting, so altought WHM would be the most barebonds DPS wise of the healers it will still have to think a lot about movement and weaving.

SCH I would add 1-2 more dots that you can spread to other targets. if we feeling spicy I feel another aetherflow damage spender that is AOE and has uses in single target might also be interesting (and lead to more chad SCH co healers while we are at it.

AST Im biased and would mostly keep it as it is. Cards would be like EW and minor and astrodyne would get a complete rework. what? idk! maybe having the option to turn lady into a buff extention would be interesting.

SGE would get a compelte rework. It would have a DPS rotation similar in complexity to PLD, you would get addersgalls by doing your rotation and get adderstings by using said healing. something more concrete would be having a 3 step combo with 2 finishers - one is a dot and the other gives you addersgal - and after using and adersgal you get an adersting to use in a different skill/combo that is very strong and the last hit puts a shield on your target and if thats broken you get another adersting.

I think this strikes a good balance between the healers. We got a simple one in WHM, SCH who would have to keep an eye on multiple dots while still healing, AST who would stil be fast paced on the 2 minute window, and sage being more close to an actual DPS.

Mostly healing as WHM, I can think of two attacks to add to it.

1. Seraph Strike, bring it from PvP to PvE. Make it cost 1 Lily to use and nourish the Blood Lily. Make the Lilies always be useful as you no longer have to wait for people to take damage, and even then Assize/Tetragrammaton is always better than Afflatus Solace or Rupture by being oGCD.

2. Bring back Fluid Aura in it's damage dealing form, though no need for knockbacks. And maybe at some level make it upgrade into Flood. It would also allow WHM to have some more connection to the CNJ roots by having spells that aren't just about Light.

Someone already linked my WHM, which makes me happy. But for those who have not seen my ramblings, here's WHM SCH AST and SGE.

Or, in shorter terms (and reduced to the absolute basics of the ideas):

WHM:
Dia reduced to 12s, potency adjusted to compensate
New skill, Water, introduced at level 15, has a 15s CD, is a GCD and is always 40p stronger than the current Stone/Glare level. Upgrades to Banish when you get Glare.

SCH:
Biolysis can stay at 30s
Miasma returns as a 24s DOT
Shadowflare returns as a 15s DOT, with 100% uptime possible. I'd suggest it be 120p on cast, and 40p per tick. By making the potency this, it's stronger than AOW (so you want to maintain it), but not strong enough to spam
Energy Drain upgrades to Bane, causing it to become AOE and spread the Bio/Miasma DOTs from primary target, to all others. If the DOT durations don't get reset by Bane, maybe include Chain in there too.

AST:
Rework cards (yes, again), so that all of them give damage, but in unique ways. For example, Bole could cause counterattacks based on Max HP, Arrow could increase Autoattack speed, etc. Have one card be 'best' for each role, with Balance being the 'wildcard' that can be used on anyone (but ideally DPS). By doing this, a 'Tank' card and 'Healer' card can exist again, allowing every party member to be a potential target, not just the DPS.

Add all 6 suits to Minor Arcana (instead of just the Crowns), and have their effects be the same as the Major Arcana of the suit, but weaker. In the idea above, they're all 300p total.

Re-add Royal Road, to sacrifice a Minor Arcana to empower a Major Arcana. The old 'Expand' effect (the AOE one) would be replaced with 'Echo', causing the card to play itself a second time, upon playing a card on someone else.

SGE:
Add two new actions, Neuralgia (a cone AOE) and Myasthenia (a line AOE), both with 2 charges and a 20s recharge time. When alternating between the two, the player would get a bonus 20p.
Add an effect to Dosis, which causes Neuralgia or Myasthenia (chosen at random with each Dosis) to reduce in CD by 1 second.
Rework Toxikon into a pseudo Enshroud, allowing for the execution of Neuralgia and Myasthenia without needing a charge.
Rework Pneuma into just the damage half, as the 'finisher' for the Toxikon window.
The healing half of Pneuma becomes a new OGCD action, Soma.

There's a lot, a LOT, more to the ideas than what is written in this post. If you'd like to see what else I'd do to fix/ruin the Jobs (depending on perspective), I'd love it if you gave my ramblings a look-see. I might be a little biased with that recommendation, though

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Originally Posted by Ramiee

Bit of a fun post to see how everyone would approach this, I feel like everyone would have different opinions on how a theoretical DPS system for each healer should be handled and im interested to see it.

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Keep in mind that I've exclusively played WHM or SCH in 100% of the content when it was new. My opinion is that AST is way too similar to White Mage to even call it different. Sage is different but the only time I ever encountered healing pressure was in the job quest it comes with. (Maybe because it was tuned for Sage and wouldn't work if you could play Scholar in it.)

Preface, the AOE is actually different between the three healers (Holy is positioned, Gravity is targeted, and Art of War is "caster centered"), but these aren't really different in any way that matters, just where you place your character when you cast.

WHM: Make use of the the "elemental" business it inherited from 1.0 Conjurer.
The two main "DPS" buttons just randomly picks 1 of 6 things - (Water, Earth, Air | Ice, Fire, Thunder)
This is largely cosmetic since the game only does unaspected damage, but when the WHM fires off a what is normally Stone/Glare, it would pick a short-cast version of 1 of the 6 elements the game.
The Dot would do the same, except apply a "DoT" that overwrites each other. So if your last cast was Fire, casting Water would remove the DoT and replace it with Water.
Holy same as normal, but stun always works on trash, but MP costs increase if cast consecutively while target stunned
Assize swaps between "Assize" (unaspected damage, refresh, and hp recovery) and "Dia II" (refresh, 1 minute long DoT, HP recovery)
(And before someone says "that steps on BLM's toes", no it doesn't, this is originally what conjurer was. Even only using Water, Earth and Air this is fine.)

As opposed to AST:
Draw a card first (no card drawn, the DPS buttons will only cast unaspected magic)
Main DPS button will cast a 5 second DoT on the target of the same card debuff + unaspected damage.
DoT DPS button will cast 30 second DoT with the same card.
AOE Gravity inflicts Heavy on trash targets, always works, but MP costs increase if cast while already debuffed
Player can either pick a card at random each cast, hold a card indefinitely


SCH:
Honestly Scholar works the way it should work, though I would give it two DoT's, and change the AOE back to the "poison field" effect.
It mostly needs to be able to cast debuffs as an AOE, and presently it does not.

Sage:
I'll leave this up to others as it's too new to call it "needing fixing"


So in short, WHM DoT's cycle between element DoT's, one at a time. (The game has Aero, Aero II and Aero III DoT's, Burns, Chilled, Filfthy, etc)
AST's DoT's can be chosen from the cards for both a debuff on the DPS and a buff when Party healing.

Like I get the intent with AST, but AST keeps getting nerfed, and WHM gets nerfed and I just see the "First time here" meme of the WHM to the AST.

Also again, careful what you wish for, any additional DPS options will come at the cost of the potency of existing ones. That's largely why they removed existing dots and extended the length of the remaining ones. The 1-1-1-1'ing comes from making the DoT's not as frequently renewed. If DoT's only lasted 8 seconds, and you had multiple ones to cast, you could just over lap them by the cast times (Which is how Scholar would have played if they didn't take them away.)

In solo content however a lot of this stuff just doesn't work. Imagine trying to do that final Zeno's battle with just short DoT's.

No matter what is suggested, The developers have decided that the healer DPS doesn't matter and thus it will always have a ceiling that makes it a joke compared to a DPS having more uptime from not having to self-heal.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

Sage:
I'll leave this up to others as it's too new to call it "needing fixing"

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I disagree with this Sage isn't really a new job it's far too similar to scholar. Sage honestly plays like a scholar spec instead of a unique job, even with astro and whm being forced to become incredible similar the cards are completely different from anything in WHM.
Sage is just... Easier scholar. Kardia is embrace most of sages moves are carbon copies of scholar and even addersting and addersgal are basically just aetherpoints except without ED.
I think sage desperate needs to be fixed and by that I mean uniqueness away from scholar because right now all it is easy scholar. Or I guess returning more pet management to scholar could have sage remain the same.

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Originally Posted by Ramiee

I disagree with this Sage isn't really a new job it's far too similar to scholar. Sage honestly plays like a scholar spec instead of a unique job, even with astro and whm being forced to become incredible similar the cards are completely different from anything in WHM.
Sage is just... Easier scholar. Kardia is embrace most of sages moves are carbon copies of scholar and even addersting and addersgal are basically just aetherpoints except without ED.
I think sage desperate needs to be fixed and by that I mean uniqueness away from scholar because right now all it is easy scholar. Or I guess returning more pet management to scholar could have sage remain the same.

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I agree, I think Scholar lost a lot of it's uniqueness by making the pet basically invisible to use. Like I played Sage a little to try and get a feel for it, and really only the GCD's felt the same as WHM/AST, despite not working exactly the same. Contrast to Scholar where you have to hit a button to get the extended kit to light up, at least the GCD "cure 2(Adloquium) and medica equivalent(Succor)" have the net same effect.

So the other day, as I was prepping to for DT, I took all my gear off including the job stone, and, guess what I saw:
https://i.ibb.co/WWPsCJR/ffxiv-ARR20-conjurer.png

Behold it's all the spells we've lost since 2.0
We've literately lost everything except Cure, Cure 2, Medica, Raise, Aero and Stone.

personally:
WHM (on top of existing tools):
aero DoT, stone single target, water target-AOE--these either one-two into each other in preferred combination/with glare/dia etc,
secondary OGCD that can proc off these being applied to slap with a holy that has an additional effect based on the prior one-two combo (like aero-or-dia -> water spreading the DoT slightly thinner but across multiple targets, or stone -> glare making lilies cooldown slightly shorter, or stone/glare -> water making the potency redistribute to be 'spikier' in single target but with appropriately sharper falloff for multitargets, or aero -> dia making a floor-puddle on the target for ticks of damage a la deathflare/garuda, idk) my scant knowledge of WHM is largely secondhand, but basically mini-mudras is the idea. just a cute slightly-customizable thing to do instead of being (just) Glare-Mage (you just go one-two and hit the OGCD at some point before you do another one-two that'd overwrite it, without taking away the existing dawntrail glare4 procs for occasional added spice recently added).

SCH (on top of existing tools):
tbh i'm torn between just letting SGE take the forcibly-passed torch by the devteam and pivoting away from a dps rotation in lieu of more interaction with the fairy gauge (gainers and spenders, possibly bringing back the now-lost-to-time-forever selene skills in this new avenue), more steamlined and synergistic skills (making dissipation/seraph/seraphism stop locking you out of parts of your kit arbitrarily, etc) and so on to just fill what would be downtime with meter/resource management instead, or gaining new spells that debuff the enemy in various ways (strength+dex/int+mind that are overwritten by their larger role-action cousins? lower enemy crit chance as a smaller mirror/reference to chain strat, slightly slower auto-attack interval? theres a lot of existing debuff avenues that could be re-tooled to actually exist in a boss/raid capacity that doesnt read "fully resisted") rather than outright damage-dealing (to serve as an opposite/foil to AST's extreme party support focus)

or just largely bringing back old-SCH, since "my busted OP ogcd kit is specifically designed to free up GCDs that i can spend on spinning multiple DoTs like plates as intended in a fluid and well-designed manner" was a good shtick and i'm still mad to see it go having gained nothing in exchange.

AST (on top of existing skills):
tbh i'd say AST could be fine with it's current dps options if they fill that time with something else, like leaning further into cards etc like the old card potency/duration/aoe modifications and cash-outs you used to be able to do to micromanage your cards just so if desired. AST had a bunch of cool stuff that was stripped away pretty arbitrarily, and could probably see a comeback without much issue.

SGE (you get it by now):
-differentiate the current [short-cast slideable GCDs with literally identical potency in both single target and aoe (sole exception being phlegma)] swathe of moves, i dont care how--move the potencies around, add secondary effects (maybe this one gives kardion target a teeny shield, or a little regen, or debuffs the enemy a little, maybe the laser also doubles as an aoe-esuna since all those got snipped, idk), literally anything to provide a proper hierarchy of spells over the current illusion of choice more or less.
-toxikon is now an OGCD (maybe THIS is the one that slaps a small shield on the kardion target mentioned above, since it thematically fits with abilities like panhaima applying several small 'ablative' shields, and you gain uses of toxikon for your shields being broken anyway)

I've posted my designs in the healer megathread about a year ago now, I'll just relink to those.

WHM Rework 1:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post6261020

Lily system is replaced with a proc system that transforms your Aero DoT and a new Water buff into Dia and Banish when using Cures and Regens. Glare is also changed into a semi-finisher after 3 Stone casts. Dia and Banish also nourish the Blood Lily. Focuses a little more on longer cast times.

WHM Rework 2:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post6383926

What if BLM was a healer? Has a damage stance that increases natural MP regen, Glare = Fire IV, Banish III = Fire III, Banish = Fire, Dia = Xenoglossy. The healing stance is entered by casting any healing spell, each spell charges the Blood Lily and comes with a hefty MP cost. Swapping back to damage using Banish III changes Banish to Afflatus Misery if the Blood Lily has any charge.

Cure is also free, but does not charge the Blood Lily, it's a failsafe to make sure that healing is always available in some form.

SCH Rework:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post6266906

Revolves around stance dancing between White Grimoire and Black Grimoire. White Grimoire summons Eos and changes your basic heals into shields, while Black Grimoire summons Selene and upgrades your DoTs (including the returning Miasma). Eos focuses on bolstering heals while Selene brings defence utilities. Aetherflow abilities are also altered massively and focus more on modifying the GCD heals rather than oGCD heals. Breaking shields grants stacks of Enlightenment that allow the use of the powerful DoT Kaustra.

SGE Rework:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post6273539

Dosis III builds Addersting and can proc Dosis IV. Eukrasian Dosis is also changed to a debuff in similar vein to Death's Design. Addersting is now your primary healing and damage gauge, with a spender that deals strong damage and restores some MP, and Pneuma spending both MP and gauge for a strong attack and heal. Kardia is also a more central mechanic with Pankardia and different Kardia effects from spells.

AST Rework:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post6280109

Focuses more on time-based effects; regens, delayed heals, DoTs, doomsday comets, and abilities to snapshot, reverse, and speed up these effects. The seal system remains, but cards themselves have varied effects and buffs, with Divination also providing a very strong party buff for using cards of different varieties. The sects also make a return to swap between barriers and regens, and can even be swapped mid-combat. Malefic also procs stacks that let you use Fall Malefic.

I think I'm happiest with SCH, AST, and my 2nd WHM reworks.

There's also an unfinished "doomsday prophet" melee healer concept I made somewhere in that thread, but I'm not super happy with some of the mechanics and want to rethink that idea too.