Geomancer and Time Mage Ideas

I find the caster DPS and the WHM/CNJ to be pretty boring in this game, and I have looked at some others' ideas on these classes. Hope you enjoy!

Geomancer - CNJ30/PUG15 (I just read another person's new version and GMN and it is VERY similar to this, I promise I had these ideas a while ago!!)

30 - Geomancy : Geomancy allows you to channel elements into your being, outputting those elemental properties onto your foes and allies. Geomancy basically allows you to stack Earth, Water, and Wind stacks. You gain stacks by casting elemental based spells. Stone/Stone II add one stack of Earth, Aero/Aero II add 1 stack of Wind, Fluid Aura adds 3 stacks of Water. Holding passive stacks of each element do the following:
Water - Emanates a crystal-fluid aura from your being with a radius of 4y. While Water Infused, you regenerate 5% of your mana pool every 3s, for each Stack of Water you are infused with. Allies share in a lessor portion of this effect, if within your circle of infusion (1/3)
Earth - Emanates a rock-hewn aura from your being with a radius of 4y. While Earth Infused, you recover 40% of the MP used to cast offensive spells 2s after casting them for each stack. Allies share in a lessor portion of this effect, if withing your circle of infusion (1/3)
Wind - Emanates a pleasant breeze from your being with a radius of 4y. While Wind Infused, you recover 40% of the mana used to cast curative or aiding spells 2s after casting them for each stack. Allies share in a lessor portion of the effect, if within your circle of infusion (1/3)

35 - Earth : Potency 200 single target attack. Short range on spell (slightly more than melee range). 4y max range from target. Can only be used with 3 Stacks of Earth, consumes all stacks when used.
- Combo'ed with Stone II: PEAE "Quake" effect that creates an AE circle that lasts for 10s, and does a 15 potency attack to all targets every 1s for 10s, while inside the circle.
- Combo'ed with Elemental Blast: PBAE "Earth Fortitude" effect, circle that grants a 30% increase in physical damage resistance to all allies inside of the "Earthen Fortitude" effect.

40 - Flood : 200 potency Targeted AE effect, target MUST be more than 9y away from caster. Drops a circle (as above) that adds the Heavy effect to all enemies in the circle while in the circle. Can only be used with 3 stacks of Water, and consumes them when used.
- Combo'ed with Fluid Aura: Potency 300, adds Bind to the effects inflicted.
- Combo'd with Elemental Blast: Grants a substantial skill-speed boost to all allies within the effects of Flood.

45 - Tornado : Targeted AE 100 potency attack that causes a 3y knockback in a random direction to each enemy. Drops a circle that has a 10% chance to inflict Aero II on each target every 1s, and a 20% chance to add Aero to each target ever 1s, for 10s. Must have 3 stacks of Wind, consumes them all on use.
Combo'd with Aero II : Tornado will refresh the duration on all Aero and Aero II effects upon dissipation.
Combo'd with Elemental Blast : Tornado adds a buff to each ally in the circle, which gives them a 20% chance to add an Aero effect with each Physical or Magical attack, and a 10% chance to add an Aero II effect with each Physical and Magical attack. These effects all stack, and origination from the person procing them, not the GEO.

50 - Elemental Blast : Melee range attack. 40s recast. An attack that delivers 6 different 25 potency elemental attacks to a single target simultaneously, each aspected to a different element.
Combo'ed with Aero/AeroII : Grants 3 stacks of Wind, and reduces the target's elemental resistance to Wind and an increased chance for a Wind-based critical hit for 3s, inclusive of the Wind Strike portion of Elemental Blast.
Combo'ed with Stone/StoneII : Grants 3 stacks of Earth, and reduces the target's elemental resistance to Earth and an increased chance for an Earth-based critical hit for 3s, inclusive of the Earth Strike portion of Elemental Blast.
Combo'ed with Fluid Aura : Grants 3 stacks of Water, and reduces the target's elemental resistance to Water and an increased chance for a Water-based critical hit for 3s, inclusive of the Water Strike portion of Elemental Blast.

Boom. OK - with the revisions: The strategy would really be to build your stacks of elements and stay by the appropriate casters to make them more powerful. As the fight progresses, you can trade in your current MP recovery for awesome effects and damage. If you were going to do the most damage possible, you would probably go:

Stone II > Stone II > Stone II > Earth > Aero II > Elemental Blast > Tornado

That would give you a highly damaging Quake effect, partnered with dropping an extremely potent Tornado buff that would give your friends the ability to stack a butt-load of Aeros all over the place!

If you needed Defense and overall mana regen:

Stone II > Elemental Blast > Earth > Fluid Aura

Boom, real quick defense buff on everyone, transitioned right into a full stack of 5% MP regen for all the casters you are standing near. However, you are now stuck doing pretty much nothing until you are confident that the healers are good. During this time, you could be casting things like Stoneskin (non-elemental aspected), and managing your Water Aura to make sure its hitting everyone.

Having Water III up a lot will be key, and that would be your recovery mode where you are doing support stuff like Raising in combo, casting stoneskins, etc. I have put too much though into this today - hehe more to come later, I think this is an improvement though!


Time Mage - THM30/ARC15

30 - Continuum : Your magic passes through the Aether and takes on the aspect of its' underlying space-time base. Ice magic now costs twice as much to cast and becomes healing magic, Potency is changed to whatever it needs to be changed to to make it balanced (double it?). Fire magic now costs twice as much and is used to cleanse its target of detrimental status effects, each Tier of Fire used removes one stack of one effect.

35 - Gravity : Targeted AE circle effect. Can only be used with Astral Fire Stacks. The circle fades upon losing Atral Fire. For each stack of Astral Fire the Time Mage has, Enemies within the Gravity circle have 2% of their hit points removed every 3 seconds. Some bosses may be resistant to these effects. (This would be almost impossible to sustain for lengthy periods due to the need to use Umbral Ice to heal). Counts as fire-aspected for Umbral purposes.

40 - Stop : Adds the effects Slow, Heavy, Bind, and Sleep to target for 30s. Off GCD, 45s recast with a relatively high mana cost. Counts as fire-aspected for umbral purposes.

45 - Quick : Increases the skillspeed of a single ally for 15s, recast 30s. Not sure what that % would need to be to keep it balanced. Counts as fire-aspected for Umbral purposes.

50 - Rewind : Adds the "rewind" effect to all allies, which heals them for 80% of the damage they receive from any attack 5s after the attack occurs. Duration is 12s, recast 20s, high mana cost. Counts as Ice-aspected for Umbral purposes.

All of those will have very high mana costs, forcing the Time Mage to stay in Umbral Ice until they are able to pop a Rewind, then they could Transpose to Fire and drop a Gravity to keep up as long as they could before needing to transpose or start an ice cycle to get back to healing. This one may need some more work, but I think I have covered the basics of healing with the Ice/Fire Continuum and Rewind gives them a HoT-Like ability at level 50 that will re-heal a party after taking large damage, but cannot be used pre-emptively. They would probably end up being the kings of AE healing Blizzard 2 and Rewind. They would probably suffer healing single targets with large incoming damage due to the outright lack of high potency healing spells and their mana bars would be all over the place. Their Quick and Stop spells allow them do help make dungeons go faster and add further CC from their AoE sleep from THM. They would also be able to XClass Physik...which would suck, but oh well, haha.

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Originally Posted by Ehayte

30 - Geomancy : This is a stance that replaces Cleric Stance. It increases Cleric Stance's effects by some potency that would balance the class, probably 2x the bonus to damage and 4x the penalty to healing?

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Pretty good ideas all around, but I wanted to talk about this one really quickly.

Cleric Stance has a very specific purpose: it's there to give healers the offensive power needed to do solo content. All of a healer's natural attributes and all the stats on the gear they have access to focus only on stats that benefit healing. Cleric Stance, thus, solves the problem of how a healer can do solo content if none of their gear is designed around dealing damage. Casters, however, do not suffer from this problem; ergo, they don't need Cleric Stance or any ability similar to it.

What casters DO need is some form of strong MP recovery. Shroud of Saints is nice, but it can't handle the MP requirements for damage dealing (especially not at the MP cost of Conjurer's current damage-dealing spells). I would replace Geomancy with something that helped the Geomancer recover MP, because Shroud of Saints can't compete with Umbral Ice and Aetherflow.

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Originally Posted by Nahara

Cleric Stance has a very specific purpose: it's there to give healers the offensive power....

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Ah yes, but that is the beauty of this. It allows the GMN to use and keep the CNJ healing-stat gear they have been accummulating and have access to later (DL, AK, ETC). By switching the PEI/MND (or whatever it does, I hate healing : D) you keep all of the same gear, and you can even use your attribute points for healing, and still get the appropriate DPS boost while in GMN.

You do have a great point on MP regen....Maybe Elemental Blast could recover X% of damage done as MP, and reduce the potency of the attack to 10 or 15 each and have a 1min refresh?

Thanks for the input, that was really constructive!

Theoretically instead of having Geomancy work by boosting Cleric Stance (because if you're making a DD out of your Conjurer we want you to take on DD gear instead of healer gear) you probably want Geomancy to be your MP recovery skill. An active that has some somewhat short-ish cooldown (40~60s cooldown) that recovers MP in one of three ways depending on the element of the ntext spell:
Earth: Recovers a flat amount of MP based on damage dealt
Wind: Grants a stronger Refresh effect, shorter-lived than Shroud of Saints but more powerful
Water: Creates a rather weak Refresh Zone, that refreshes MP as long as you're in it. Aids allies too.

Theoretically you would want to always be under effect of two of those, and since multiple copies of the same don't stack

I like that idea - (I still like being in enhanced cleric stance, but OK OK OK!!) - I would rather have the potency of each of those ideas be reduced, though, and have Geomancy STILL be a stance, and you can build stacks of Elements. Like Stone/StoneII/Earth gives you 1 stack of Earth and you can get up to 3, Aero/Aero2/Tornado = wind stacks, Flood gives you two and Aqua gives you one water stack:

In Earth: Each stack recovers 10% of damage done into MP for you, and 5% of damage done into MP for others in your circle (circle is something like 3-4y that stays around you as you move)
In Water: Each stack returns to you 10% of the MP used to cast any spell, and 5% for others in your circle, but 7% if the spell aids an ally.
In Wind: Provides a weak "Mana Regen" circle for you (uhh 4%/tick/stack?), and a weaker one for your allies (2% a tick)

So go stand by the SMN/BLM in Earth, Healers for Water, and everyone for Wind.

Adds an even more interesting support element!

If we keep getting better ideas I'll re-write the OP.

Actually, I would think the Geomancer job would see Stone III and Aero III as possible skills to build off the CNJ class.

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Originally Posted by Ehayte

(I just read another person's new version and GMN and it is VERY similar to this, I promise I had these ideas a while ago!!)

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Haha, no problem. Small world, people are bound to have similar ideas.

GEO:

As said above, Cleric Stance is an ability to give healers the ability to solo. This is why I made it so Cleric Stance is entirely swapped by Geomancy in one of my ideas when the CNJ equips the GEO soul. GEO as a DPS has no need for Cleric Stance and therefor it becomes entirely useless. I'm more of a fan of altering a class ability for a specific job than to completely negate it. As it stands with your idea, Cleric Stance would swap the users MND and INT as well as boost DPS by 20% and hurt healing by 80%. This is essentially just a 20% bonus to DPS as a DPS shouldn't be healing. However you're now also faced with the drop of INT and increase of MND. To me this seems like a waste of an ability slot.

Also as said above, GEO needs some form of MP restoral. BLM has UI, SMN has Aether, GEO will have just SoS which isn't very potent. This is why both of my ideas incorporate a second form of MP restoral.

I'm not entirely sure of how your combo system works. The format doesn't follow what is already established in game. Unless of course I'm misreading it and your abilities are backwards compatable in combos. For example: It sounds like you mean for Aero II > Tornado > EB. But because of EB's text it sounds like you need to choose between either AeroII > Tornado OR EB > Tornado.

It also looks like your concept of GEO is along the same lines of BRD, a DPS with the ability to support. With this, I think some potencies need to be reduced. For instance Earth has a 460 potency and no established recast (default 2.5s) which would make it way powerful.

TIM:

First off Stop seems to be pretty overpowered. TIM already has Sleepga (30s) and Lethargy (Slow+Heavy (12s)). 30s Bind is pretty intense as well. Also, pairing Sleep and Bind seems redundant to me. Assuming people are out of attack range they effectively do the same thing and both wear off upon taking damage.

Gravity won't have much use to a TIM. If a boss is immune that's an ability that goes entirely unused. Every boss will pretty much have to be immune. Most bosses (all bosses?) have HP values in the 10's of thousands. If a boss has 40k HP, first tick alone does 800 damage. A healer does NOT want that kind of damage on top of their heals. If there's no recast on Continuum, couldn't the TIM just drop it to fire off some Fires on trash mobs? They'll have Thunder as well remember similar to how WHM/SCH have their DoTs.

A SCH's Fey Light increases skill speed by 30% for 30s with a recast of 60s in an AoE. You could get by with Quick being 30% with current recast and duration. Though you'd have to know which member had the best base skillspeed to make best use of this and you'd fall into having to maintain this buff at all times possible.

Problems I see with Rewind right off the bat are with Titan. Group might die to stomps before the effect triggers and would only heal for 600HP after suffering 3k damage due to the first hit triggering it. Don't forget Blizzard II is a shorter range than Medica as well, 5y VS 20y.

I'm not entirely sure I see very good synergy either with UI/AF. They have their cures on the UI cycle so they will never run out of MP. There presently isn't a way to differentiate removing a stack of a debuff either which makes multiple forms of Fire pointless. I'm not even aware of many debuffs that stack as well outside of one or two bosses that have other mechanics to remove it. It's really hard to find a system that works with UI/AF for a healer. Main reason why I chose to make a crowd control DPS instead of a healer. It would certainly be nice to see as a healer but talk about a balancing nightmare.

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Originally Posted by Nahara

Cleric Stance has a very specific purpose: it's there to give healers the offensive power needed to do solo content. All of a healer's natural attributes and all the stats on the gear they have access to focus only on stats that benefit healing. Cleric Stance, thus, solves the problem of how a healer can do solo content if none of their gear is designed around dealing damage. Casters, however, do not suffer from this problem; ergo, they don't need Cleric Stance or any ability similar to it.

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SCH and SMN already demonstrate that the devs think that separate roles off of the same class *should* use different stats and gear. There shouldn't even *be* a stance to replace Cleric Stance since, as you mentioned before, it's there to let healers solo. At most, if you want to design a DPS class that uses MND rather than INT, you should just go with Cleric Stance on its own. The Geomancy stance really is just kind of arbitrary. Either go with Cleric Stance or abandon the need for a stance completely (which is what you'd want to do; if MND is the DPS stat, they could turn it off and be 90% of a healer thanks to their native healing abilities and high MND).

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What casters DO need is some form of strong MP recovery. Shroud of Saints is nice, but it can't handle the MP requirements for damage dealing (especially not at the MP cost of Conjurer's current damage-dealing spells). I would replace Geomancy with something that helped the Geomancer recover MP, because Shroud of Saints can't compete with Umbral Ice and Aetherflow.

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The solution to this, as I see it, is to provide, at 30, an attack that provides you with a 10 sec Refresh buff that is designed to top you off or returns mp based upon damage dealt.

Since there isn't a straight up Water attack (the only CNJ "water attack" is fluid aura), the level 30 ability could be Water (so that you've got the full trinity). As long as its got lower potency than Stone II, is a DoT, and/or has a DoT, it will serve the needed purpose without overshadowing other attacks.

As to everything else on Geomancer, the random knockback effect on Tornado would make *no one* want to see it used; it might be better to have it act like a ground based silence (the howling winds prevent you from being able to say anything) similar to how Shadow Flare is a ground based slow (no duration and only applies while the target is in it). Only adding a single new ST attack doesn't really do much to change up the rotation, given that you're really having Earth replace Stone II in anything except for AoE scenarios. You may also want to rethink the layered/simultaneous combos, especially since Elemental Blast already serves a given purpose in reducing resistances.

A better loadout would probably be Water (150 potency, Refresh potency 20, duration 10 seconds, no CD), Elemental Blast (as a straight up cast; high potency, on CD, reduces resistance or increases your own damage), Quake (ground based targeted AoE that ticks for damage), Flood (single target, intense DoT over 30 seconds, chance to reset Elemental Blast on tick), and Tornado (AoE, on CD; spreads Aero and Aero II to all enemies within 5m of target). A DPS has to be overwhelmingly ST based since otherwise you're handicapping them in any fight with CC and making them *hugely* overpowered on any fight with multiple targets (like Garuda or turn 4) and you really need some way to crank the living hell out of Stone II, Aero, and Aero II's potency on a regular basis.

Let's do some math to get a starting point.

The "basic" BLM rotation is Thunder>Fire III>Fire>Fire>Fire>Fire>Fire>Fire>Blizz III. There's some tweakery in there based upon procs but we'll do the math for that (I expect 1-2 Firestarter procs which is why it looks like there are too many Fire casts). I *believe* that 3 stacks of Astral Fire is a 75% increase to damage dealt and Umbral Ice/Astral Fire reduces the opposite damage type by 50% so we'll multiply those out. Thunder has a ~25% chance per cast to proc Thundercloud at some point during its duration, which means that you can expect to get a Thunder III in there for a bonus 340 potency per cycle. Fire III and Blizz III both have 3 sec casts so they have to be normalized to the 2.5 sec GCD by multiplying their potencies by 83.33%. Firestarter is, basically, a 40% chance on each Fire cast to turn your next Fire into a Fire III (which extends the Astral Fire phase a bit), which is 70 extra potency; it's easy enough to just act as if

(275 + .25 * 340) + (220 * .5 * .8333) + ((150 + 70 * .4) * 1.75 * 6) + (220 * .5 * .8333) = 2412.326 potency over 9 "GCDs" = 268 magic potency per GCD

It's not *exactly* correct, but it's close enough for us to give us a guideline.

CNJs get Aero for 200 potency (50 + 25 * 6), Aero II for 210 (50 + 40 * 4), and Stone II for 170 potency. Even if CNJ got to chaincast Aero II with full up front damage, CNJ still wouldn't do enough damage. In reality, CNJ is only pulling 181.75 potency per GCD (Aero is 1 cast every 8 GCDs, Aero 2 is 1 cast every 5, and Stone is filler; 200 * 1 / 8 + 210 + 1 / 5 + 170 * (1 - (1 / 8 + 1 / 5))). Unless the devs straight up buff a lot of those potencies, no CNJ is going to manage an interesting rotation while also managing appropriate levels of damage without some multipliers *and* buffed up attacks.

Going off of my previous suggestions, here's some tweaks:
Water as a 200 potency attack you cast once every 12 seconds (50 potency DoT with 4 ticks that returns 100+% of damage dealt by it as mp).
The 6 hits on Elemental Blast is a really interesting idea and I'd like to play with that: have Elemental Blast increase damage by 10% for each of those attacks that scores a critical hit; have each one deal 40 potency each (240 total) and put it on a 20 sec CD (give the buff a 12 second duration so you can't have it up all the time by default).
Flood would just be a buffed up Water, doing 350 potency over 30 seconds (35 potency DoT with 10 ticks) with each tick having a 50% chance to reduce the CD on Elemental Blast by 2.5 seconds (1.25 secs every 3 secs, effectively).
Tornado, 150 potency to target and all other enemies within 5y, cleaves Aero and Aero II to all nearby enemies and has a 20% chance. Give it a 10 second CD since it's effectively an AoE with a potency between 345 (if you cast on CD; 25 * 3 from Aero and 40 * 3 from Aero II) and 370 (if you let the DoTs finish before recasting, 25 * (6 - 2) from Aero, 40 * (4 - 1) from Aero II).
Quake could be done like Shadow Flare with potency 40 instead of 25, which would have it behave like a 400 potency attack every 30 seconds, which adds a bit more.

So, now let's add it up.
Elemental Blast provides 240 potency and, assuming a 20% crit chance, a 12% increase to damage. With Flood, it would bring the average CD down to ~13.33 seconds, but, if recast early, it stacks up more, capped at 6, if so we'll assume 100% uptime on the buff with a 15% total contribution (since overlapping casts are effectively going to double the value so it's higher in practice; this I'm just eyeballing). So that's one 300 potency attack every 6 GCDs and a 20% increase to total damage.
Water provides 200 potency every 5 GCDs.
Flood provides 350 potency every 12 GCDs.
Tornado is an AoE so we ignore it for ST purposes.
Quake provides 400 potency every 12 GCDs.
Aero is 200 potency every 8.
Aero II is 210 potency every 5.
Stone II is 170 potency filler.

Of course, all of those add up to more than 100% of your cast time so we'll just use the highest potency ones until we get up there (you end up using everything except for Aero II and).

Let's multiply all of that out:
1.15 * (240 / 6 + 200 / 5 + 350 / 12 + 400 / 12 + 200 / 8 + 210 / 5 + 170 * (1 - (1 / 6 + 1 / 5 + 1 / 12 + 1 / 12 + 1 / 8 + 1 / 5))) = 268.6 potency per GCD

So those modifications get close to a tie with BLM while providing an interesting rotation/playstyle that actually gets mixed up thanks to the CD variability on Elemental Blast.

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Originally Posted by MartaDemireux

It also looks like your concept of GEO is along the same lines of BRD, a DPS with the ability to support. With this, I think some potencies need to be reduced.

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The devs have stated that they want Bard to be effectively equal in DPS to the other DPS so making their damage lower than the other DPS isn't really appropriate. Keep in mind, the ability for Bard to reduce its damage to increase resource regeneration (i.e. the entirety of its "support" capability) is entirely optional. If you wanted to allow Geomancer to provide a similar benefit, you may want to consider having full DPS be stanceless and support be a stance that allows your other abilities to buff your allies while reducing your own damage. This way Geomancer is fully capable damage all the time and capable/balanced support when it's needed.

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For instance Earth has a 460 potency and no established recast (default 2.5s) which would make it way powerful.

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I'm reasonably sure that *all* persistent ground effects in the game tick on the same 3s interval server as DoTs do (and I'm not sure that the devs would change that for a single ability) so it would more likely be 75 potency tick every 3, using his numbers. Of course, because that tick is effectively a DoT, if you chain cast Stone II>Earth to recast the quake as soon as possible, you're only getting 252 potency per GCD (170 + 210 + 75 * 5 / 3) thanks to replacing the Quake. Of course, a 75 damage tick is almost outrageously high, so it's more likely that it would be brought down to 40 (Flame Arrow is the BRD's, is 35 potency, and on a 60 sec CD), which give you 223.33.

Thanks for the suggestions. Loud and clear - I'm going to edit the OP today, some clarifications that I will change up top as well, and some responses to the cool ideas everyone had!

GEO :
- Geomancy was intended to be a static stance along with your Job soul. Meaning you can never ever take it off. I thought being able to use all your old CNJ/WHM armor would be cool, but I understand it needs to be changed. I'm not crazy about adding Water as a job skill, as I feel like there is already a lot to add, and making it your MP regen isn't exactly concurrent with Fluid Aura. I am going to change Geomancy to your MP regen ability - and the style of the regen will be based on the stacks you have up.
- Combo system: This was very unclear, and I have some major tweaks that play on your Geomacy stacks that I think everyone will be pleased with. The basic idea is Stone II > Quake > Elemental Blast > Flood/Tornado. However, I have some adjustments to that I think will make it way more fun.
- Tornado : Yeah the 7y knockback is just stupid, but I explained the ancillary effects poorly as well. Inside of the Tornado Circle (ele blast combo'ed), PLAYERS get a buff that allows them to add (from themselves) the Aero an Aero II effects. Basically, you have your WAR start blasting 12 mobs in a speed run with overpower, and everytime he hits one, it has a 20% chance to land Aero, and a 10% chance to land Aero II. Basically it turns all of your allies into DoT proccing machines. You could be looking at 8 Aero/AeroIIs stacked on a mob under the Tornado Effect. That is hugely overpowered, so I figured the KB was a necessary drawback...but probably something like 3y would do the trick, just enough to cause a little chaos and force the tank to wrangle everything back in for AoEs.
Theorycrafting : My eyes gloss over so much when I try to get into examining the #s, The potencies I throw out are just mild guesses at balance, I trust that whatever Kitru comes us with in terms of #s makes sense and creates the theoretical balance.

Time Mage:
- Stop : Stop IS OPed, to make up for the fact that Time Mage has some pretty serious weaknesses in healing. i.e. short range on AE heals, managing stacks, etc. Maybe give them a trait that allows bind to persist through damage, with a 20% chance to break on any new attack, and reduce the timer on the Bind. So that is fail safe if you Stop something, and then some dummy smacks it, you have a chance to retain the CC.
- Gravity : Well, Continuum would have a beastly CD, so if you dropped out of it, you better be damn sure you don't need it for a WHILE, so they need some form of doing some kind of damage outside of Thunder DoTs. Bosses are resistant to its effects, not immune. Meaning, you would cap the dmg that it could do per tick, or reduce the potency to.... uh.... No idea, .2% / stack? I'd need some theorycrafting firepower or more time on my hands to figure that out, hehe.
- Quick : I'd want it to be more powerful than Fey Light by a pretty good margin, as this would be a strong point of Time Mage.
- Rewind : Yup, it will be tough to use, better not try to solo heal titan on a Time Mage : D It would be Rewind > Blizzard II Spam > Blizzard on STs that need it. I see Rewind as a mitigation tool as opposed to a true healing tool. BUT, if it wouldn't work in practice, change that to 3s, or 2s, or 1.5s - whatever would needed to balance it out.
- Fire Mechanic : No need to differentiate anything, 1 rank of fire will remove the most recent stack of any debuff. Whether that is poison, para, heavy, etc. There are plenty of times people have multiples, for instance, if you are fighting the slime boss in WP and are heavy and para'ed, Fire II would cure both of those at once, but at the cost of the Time Mage's mana regeneration, and its a huge cost because Transpose doesn't do much here. You can transpose to fire, and remove status effects like a boss, but then you have to cast 2 Ice spells to get back to generating mana again. I'm actually of the opinion that this one would be a very interesting mechanic, and it would just take some potency tweaking to get it balanced.

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Originally Posted by Ehayte

- Fire Mechanic : 1 rank of fire will remove the most recent stack of any debuff.

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Ah, must have been your terminology. A stack is something there can be multiples of. For instance Defiance builds stacks of Wrath. Having multiple debuffs are just called debuffs. Some bosses give a debuff that builds stacks. That's what I thought you were referring to.

You'll see when you level your THM higher that Blizzard III actually immediately gives you III stacks of Umbral Ice. The same goes for Fire III. I didn't read anywhere in your post about altering the mechanic.

So with this in mind, you'd only ever use Fire III to remove multiple debuffs and then either transpose back to Ice or toss a Blizzard III to heal someone. You'd have to tie in some sort of a mechanic to remove X amount of debuffs based on how many stacks of AF you have, not on the actual tier. Before AF is taken into account Fire 1 would be used to cleans 1 debuff, Fire 2 would cleans 1 debuff in an AoE (since normally its AoE) and Fire 3 to remove 2 debuffs from a target. With AF the MP costs are doubled for fire spells so you could justify the higher cost in increasing stacks. 1 stack adds 1 debuff removed per spell, essentially retaining its normal potency buff. I don't think you want to double the fire costs further, though, as AF already does that. With AF at level 50 your Fire 1 is 638MP, 2 is 850, 3 is 1064. Under UI your Fire spells are about half their normal cost. Under AF your ice spells are reduced in cost by about half as well.

The real issue with the mechanic though is UI. UI3 recovers like 2k MP per tic. This is why I say they'll be able to cure non stop with no regard to MP and would make them the go-to healer if you had a long fight. You'll either have to make the amount cured be very small to justify the spamming (which simply doubling potencies would do) or make the enmity costs higher to impose a risk of spamming. The problem then is having a cure strong enough to top off a tank that just ate a strong attack.

Continuum should be a stance but it needs to be able to be removed. As already covered, the CNJ gets Cleric Stance so that it may do respectable damage solo or in non-crucial moments. TIM is stemming from a DPS class so you have a couple of options here:

A) It could get the same treatment as SCH in that it's automatically in a healing stance when the soul is equipped. Cleric Stance is equipped and used as needed when damage needs to be done. It would mean no change to THM spells and instead getting all heals and utility spells from cross-classing or as job abilities.
B) It could get a healing stance similar to how a tank needs a tanking stance. This would change its attacks into heals and utility abilities.

Your Continuum would fall under option B. WHM's pop CS and then toss on some DoT's or Holy a group of enemies down fast. SCH's pop CS and toss on some DoT's and Bane 3 other enemies. Why should TIM be gimped in the same practice? Turn on Continuum to heal, turn it off to drop some Fire II's. You'd still have your Thunder line of spells as well as Thunderstorm procs in between cures just as the other healers have access to their nukes without Cleric Stance but deal less damage. Or make it so all heals are learned from the job/cross classing and let them equip Cleric Stance.

A good thing to ask yourself here is: How will the TIM be able to kill their job quest monsters and keep themselves or others healed at the same time? The WHM quests as an example involve both healing others and making use of attacking enemies to teach you that there are times when a good nuke will be more beneficial than a heal.

To me the Geo. Should have a spell list based on the four elements. Earth, fire, and water

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Originally Posted by MartaDemireux

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RE: Fire - Yes, that is a better idea, the amount of debuffs removed (sorry, I was using EQ1 terminology "stack") should be based on the stacks of AF you carry ( : D ). And yes, I would envision only Fire II and Fire III being used. By the by, I do have a higher level BLM, I have it on a different char to double up on Mytho generation.

RE: UI3 - Yeah, I would imagine that the potencies are decreased, AND the enmities are increased. The main thing the class is lacking is an "Oh SH*T" heal. I suppose Blizzard III could do that, but you don't really have any consequences for using it, since you have unlimited mana. With double potency and 1.25 enmity, you could spam BIII to recover a big hit, then toss BIs out to sustain, combined with a 50%+ up time on rewind. Good point, there would need to be some tweaking. I am liking my own TIM less and less as I think more about the implementation. I think its possible and would be fun, but just like my MYS it would be hard to balance and implement.

RE: Continuum - You're right, I would probably put a SHORTER CD on it than Cleric Stance, as you have NO healing capability outside of Continuum, and if you are specced for healing, its not like your FireIIs are going to be doing massive damage.

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Originally Posted by LadyVaJedi

To me the Geo. Should have a spell list based on the four elements. Earth, fire, and water

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That's three . . .

Also, Fire Ice and Lightening are taken by the THM, and the game recognizes 6 elements, Fire, Ice, Lightning, Water, Earth, Wind. From the CNJ class skills, you get access to Wind, Earth, and Water attacks, so GEO would use those. Also, Geomancers traditionally work in the realm of Earth, as they are not Elemental Sorcerers, but they are more like Earth mages.

I forgot to type air. Silly me. True. There should be at least a mage that deals with the elements only.

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Originally Posted by LadyVaJedi

There should be at least a mage that deals with the elements only.

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As said before, the game doesn't recognize only the 4 traditional elements that the Greeks identified. The game recognizes the 6 elements that the FF series has used over the course of time, which is why BLM gets half and CNJ gets the other half.