Toxicon Adjustment

I know it’s been said before but hey, if more people are suggesting it, maybe it’ll get traction.

I’d LOVE to see an oGCD toxicon. That one change would make the job feel so much more satisfying to play. I like Sage a lot… but healers in general have such simple DPS rotations that adding in that little bit would be a breath of fresh air. It would also make the skill a true DPS recovery skill for using your shield.

Right now you loose a lot for using the shield. It’s MP expensive, you loose the 330 damage potency, AND you loose the 170 healing potency from Kardion. An oGCD toxicon would remove the “sting” from building addersting and make building and spending it a core part of the job instead of an afterthought.

Toxicon is meant to act as a Ruin II equivalent, so it being oGCD would make it closer to Energy Drain. If that happened, it would require a potency adjustment not only for Toxicon, but also Energy Drain. The reason Toxicon works as is, is because it's an extra resource to build, and isn't shared with the Addersgall stacks. Otherwise, it would just be a carbon copy of Aetherflow.

I think the problem with it for me is that it feels like it is trying to be a combination two different things and not doing a good job at any of them.

It isn’t a good Ruin II. Ruin II is meant to help mitigate damage loss if you have to move by being an on-demand instant spammable with slightly reduced potency. In order to use Toxicon, you first have to have used your Shield (AND have had it broke). Justifying Shield is hard. It’s more expensive to use than the Scholar shield (because you loose the 170 heal from Kardion as part of the opportunity cost), and you have lots of oGCD options for healing instead. In fact, due to Sage cast mechanics, a forced movement stage is the best time to use the Shield, so you probably won’t have Toxicon available when you need it. If you can even cast Toxicon, you have already lost more than you would loose by casting a Ruin II.

So it is a Ruin II that required you to have already sacrificed 330 Damage and 170 Healing potency to even cast on a per-cast basis. That’s such a huge opportunity cost that I find it hard to believe that it is a good Ruin II replacement in its current form. In order to act as a reasonable Ruin II replacement, Addersting would have to be gained in another, less costly, way. Like for example if using a stack of Addersgall gave you a stack of Addersting.

It’s definitely not an Energy Drain replacement. Energy Drain is an Aetherflow dump. It is extremely inefficient compared to anything else that Aetherflow can do… but if you can play well enough to use no GCD healing and less than 3 Aetherflow heals in 60 seconds you get a small DPS reward. Toxicon is nothing like this and shouldn’t try to be. If Toxicon became an oGCD skill it still wouldn’t be analogous to Energy Drain.

The last thing it could be, and I think it would fit this role best, is as a DPS recovery like Afflatus Misery. If Toxicon were made into an oGCD skill, it would immediately fill this role. Sage wouldn’t need a Ruin II analog because your forced movement skill would be your Shield. You would then cast Toxicon sometime later to re-coup the lost damage from not having a spammable attack spell you can use while moving. It would also create another playstyle difference between Sage and Scholar, which is a good thing.

Right now, it feels like it wants to be an Afflatus Misery, but unlike Afflatus which takes 3 GCD heals to enable, 1 to cast, and do the damage of 4 Glares (thus giving you the same damage as if you spent all 4 on Glare) it doesn’t recoup any lost DPS GCDs. It gives you a single charge of Ruin II. A charge that costs more to gain than you get out of it.

I think the solution isn't to make Toxikon oGCD - it's to make Phlegma oGCD and use Toxikon to decrease its cooldown.
Building stacks of addersting and using Toxikon would still benefit towards DPS but in a more roundabout way that rewards using the shields every so often so you can squeeze in some extra Phlegma casts on the oGCD for more DPS potency and moving the 'lost' 170 potency Kardion heals down the road a little bit. With Phlegma currently being a 45s charge, each Toxikon cast could reduce that time by 15s, meaning that blowing all 3 stacks of sting nets one extra Phlegma. I'd also increase it to 3 charges and maybe reduce the potency to account for extra casts, give SGE a mini DPS rotation of Dosis GCD > Phlegma oGCD > Toxikon GCD > Phlegma oGCD > Toxikon GCD > Phlegma oGCD > Toxikon GCD - this'll complete the charge time allowing for > Phlegma oGCD. 8 ability long burst phase (9 if you wanna end it with a Pneuma and just go nuts) to do under the effect of a party raid buff to play into the DPS feel of the class, and incentivise getting more sting stacks during the downtime between bursts so that you can burst again when the raid buffs come back around because it'll all balance out eventually. And the beauty is that it'd work on trash AOE pulls as well as single-target applications. Only difference you'd have to do is open with Dyskrasia instead of Dosis and now it's a fully AOE burst.

The idea behind Toxicon seems to simply be a movement tool for when you don't have time to slidecast wherever you need to be and can't be in range for Phlegma. You're supposed to plan around the limited supply of 3 stacks and whatever extra stacks you can gain during downtime where casting GCD shields doesn't cost you dps.


I don't necessarily see an issue with having to plan your movement throughout a fight. Sure, SCH always has access to Ruin 2 but since the changes to Broil's cast time it is always a dps loss.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

The idea behind Toxicon seems to simply be a movement tool for when you don't have time to slidecast wherever you need to be and can't be in range for Phlegma. You're supposed to plan around the limited supply of 3 stacks and whatever extra stacks you can gain during downtime where casting GCD shields doesn't cost you dps.


I don't necessarily see an issue with having to plan your movement throughout a fight. Sure, SCH always has access to Ruin 2 but since the changes to Broil's cast time it is always a dps loss.

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This is a good reason.

Toxicon being a oGCD, I can't imagine that without feeling something really weird about that. If we were to put Toxicon as an oGCD, this will lead to a bursting tool rather than a tool allowing you to get more mobility for a few second. Same goes for Phlegma this can keep your mobility while at melee range. Moving Toxicon oGCD mean Sage lose a lot in mobility. And the class seems quite fun like it is now, in my opinion, touching that is a really bad idea.

Discounting balance, I've always been advocating for oGCD Toxikon, if only for the fact that it'd be a great gameplay improvement. DPS to heal AND heal to DPS would finally make sense.

Plus it'd make for a fast paced and innovative combo, making greater use of a sage's core skill, eukrasia.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TabrisOmbrelame

This is a good reason.

Toxicon being a oGCD, I can't imagine that without feeling something really weird about that. If we were to put Toxicon as an oGCD, this will lead to a bursting tool rather than a tool allowing you to get more mobility for a few second. Same goes for Phlegma this can keep your mobility while at melee range. Moving Toxicon oGCD mean Sage lose a lot in mobility. And the class seems quite fun like it is now, in my opinion, touching that is a really bad idea.

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There's no real mobility loss since if it's dps neutral you'd rebuild it as soon as you're done moving, basically keeping a full stack at all times until the next burst window.

Have GCD toxicon which is a movement tool and an OGCD toxicon on a 15 second cooldown (some arbitrary number). Choose when you need movement tool toxicon and when you want your damage back for the shield.

Toxikon is a movement tool that Sage has 3 charges of. Any downtime will grant you additional stacks. It should not be an oGCD and is fine as is. Rhizomata could potentially grant 1 Addersting stack, but then Sage would have even more insane mobility.

It bamboozles me how everyone seems fine with dedicating an entire gauge mechanic to Ruin II considering how the community generally feels about the rest of healer design. It genuinely feels like I'm being punked or that I've looked into a parallel world where logic has flipped upside down. It's far more illogical to me than even the current direction of healing as a whole.

Toxikon is worse than stormblood lilies. There, I said it.

EDIT: accidentally double-posted.