So, I've been looking over the role actions for healers for the past few days now, and there is something I really must protest over, and that is the state of Eye for an Eye in the game currently. There are only 5 role action slots, and healers got hit really hard by the changes thereof. Things like swiftcast for instant revives in boss fights, and Esuna for removing the MANY debuffs of this game are absolutely necessary and you are a worse healer for not having them. (For the life of me, I don't know why Esuna was not just GIVEN to every healer class by default. Have you ever seen a healer in any RPG unable to remove status ailments?)
This has led to some amount of debate in my FC, and my current leader has eschewed protect in favor of eye for an eye. She's always loved scholar and feels that EFAY is part of their identity, and in that, she is not wrong. Deployment tactics even references it by name! For that alone, EFAY should have remained a skill exclusive to SCH. However, I've been doing some math that shows that protect is significantly more useful and less situational than EFAY, reducing the latter skill to an unreliable damage mitigation skill that is dubious at best.
Currently, the formula to compute defense, unless it has been updated since last year, is 1- (0.0001725 x magic defense/physical defense). This formula means that for every 600 points of defense in either category, you receive another 10% damage mitigation bonus at a flat rate. Now, protect on healers and DPS is negligible at best. My initial tests on my own SCH showed an increase from 903 to 1038, the damage mitigation going from 16% to 18%, protect increasing the defense values by roughly 15%. However, my much better geared paladin showed an increase of 4459 to 5127, damage mitigation going from 77% to 88%, and again, it shows the same consistent 15% increase. I had another healer in Kugane apply the buff to me, showing that the figure does not vary when cast by yourself or by another healer.
Now, let's compare this to the RNG that is EFAY. Let's say, for argument's sake, that the tank has 6 enemies attacking them in a single pull, the fight will take 10 seconds (very short, but we're just doing maths), and all the adds together will have a combined damage output of 12,000 total for the whole fight, 2,000 per enemy. The healer cast's EFAY on the tank, who is going to be receiving all the damage with no loss of threat for this pull, and, if EVERY enemy is afflicted right at the start of the fight on their first attack, the damage is reduced to 10,800. If only one enemy is effected, damage is reduced to 11,800. That's....not very much. Now, we compare this to the defense buff granted by protect, which will always apply to every single strike regardless of whether or not it is magical, physical, projectile or melee. Just using the 11% damage mitigation values I computed on my paladin from before, damage is reduced to 10,680. Even in this hypothetical scenario, tailored to make EFAY as effective as possible, it still loses HARD to protect. In any live action situation, the fights will draw on much longer and that will involve % to proc on hit, and expiring durations that I'm not smart enough to compute on the fly.
Bottom line, when EFAY was a scholar only exclusive and not competing against any other skill, it was an interesting addition to the Scholar's repertoire. It worked well IN COMBINATION with other healer skills, but when it has to compete against the likes of lucid dreaming, largesse, or protect, it just isn't viable enough to warrant losing one of those other skills.
Scholar's note: all of this is based on my own calculations, and I have been wrong before. If you see any mistakes, please point them out to me.
Eye for an Eye is no longer viable
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06-28-2017, 10:38 PMPonderaEye for an Eye is no longer viable
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06-28-2017, 10:43 PMInuk9
1 healer gets protect the other gets Eye.
In dungeon content you can get both as scholar no problem.
It's not like the 2 skils compete with each other, their effects can be stacked. -
06-28-2017, 10:49 PMdeos
just cast protect at the beginning of a dungeon, then switch it out for E4E. aside from not beeing able to recast it on rezed ppl while infight this works fine
you can switch out role skills at anytime outfight without any penalty (you can not switch ones that are on CD though, but esuna and protect are GCD skills so you can always switch out esuna for a quick protect recast even if all other role skills are on CD) -
06-28-2017, 11:35 PMAmelieRSrsly, that works? It never came to my mind 'cause I thought this wouldn't work. I can't believe this is intended by the devs though.Quote:
Originally Posted by deos
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06-29-2017, 12:05 AMPonderaAll my math and formula figuring and you come up with the simplest solution I never even thought of. My hat is off to you, sirQuote:
Originally Posted by deos
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06-29-2017, 12:22 AMRiyshn
Honestly the Healer cross-roll skills are a mess in general. As far as I can tell, the only reason Esuna, Lucid Dreaming, Largesse, and Break are even in there is because they couldn't think of a full 10 skills, so they decided to just fuck us all over by removing (or heavily nerfing) those tools that all 3 healers already had anyway and then forcing us to pick them back. And Cleric Stance only seems to still exist so they could say that they didn't completely remove it, but with it's current numbers is pretty much never worth the slot.
(No, not getting Leeches until Lv40 was not any particular hardship for SCH, especially since HW added Fey Caress, which is more than enough for the 2 dungeons pre-40 that actually poison people. And yes, I'm still sore about SCH now having no skill attached to the Lv40 quest.) -
06-29-2017, 12:26 AMHysterior
I see no point in taking it over another cross-skill.
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06-29-2017, 12:49 AMYenNoxThis seems to be intended by the developers. It's clearly written in the patch notes. And I always do it that way.Quote:
Originally Posted by AmelieR
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06-29-2017, 12:49 AMFadingMoonI do the exact same thing. You know what is funny. Outside maybe one dungeon( wasn't a big deal that I didn't have esuna on at the time) I didnt have a need for esuna for ANY of the dungeons 61-70. Outside content is a different story. Esuna is a must there. There are mobs that apply a 20 second heavy. There are fate mobs that will apply accuracy down for 20 seconds.Quote:
Originally Posted by deos
I think people are blowing this drama over role system for healers a bit much. It takes 2 seconds to swap.
Most will take Swift, dreams, and probably (new divine seal) Esuna can be used as needed so that one is easy to swap. Eye for Eye still has its uses even though the CD is longer because TBH anything that can reduce damage should be taken by a healer no questions asked.
Cleric is a waste for only a 5% increase for such a long cooldown imo. -
06-29-2017, 12:58 AMSpiroglyph
Do you guys manually change the role skills at the start or do you have a macro for it? If so, mind sharing it? :)
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06-29-2017, 01:03 AMPondera/macrolockQuote:
Originally Posted by Spiroglyph
/macroicon Protect
/echo You are now switching to Protect.
/aaction Esuna off
/aaction Protect on
/ac Protect <wait.3>
/aaction Protect off
/aaction Esuna on
/echo Protect has been disabled. The following skill has been restored:
/recast Esuna
I got this off reddit. They used swift cast, but since Esuna has no cooldown time and if something goes wrong, you'll be stuck in a fight without the ability to remove debuffs as opposed to being unable to insta-rez people, so lesser of two evils. -
06-29-2017, 02:37 AMShikiseki
I feel like with the recent buff to AST shields, Eye for an Eye effect should automatically be placed with Adlo (especially with those unjustified MP costs).
The only reason that actually makes sense is that Deployment Tactics actively uses the Eye for an Eye effect so having to sacrifice a cross skill job for this feels like a huge oversight on the SCH playtesters (not sure WHAT they tested with scholar though, it's a silly contradictory mess right now)
Aetherflow is another good example that was only nerfed to make Lucid Dreaming on Scholar not worthless which, imo, shouldn't be the case! -
06-29-2017, 03:03 AMRyuDragnierI'd only accept the Adlo cost if Aetherflow was still the old 20% max MP heal it was. Since it's now 10%, the Adlo cost increase is too much IMO. Especially since we're already blowing through a lot of our MP with Succor during the EX fights now due to the amount of raid wide damage we're seeing.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shikiseki
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06-29-2017, 03:13 AMSpiroglyphThank you so much!Quote:
Originally Posted by Pondera
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06-29-2017, 03:22 AMDzian
The bit that annoys me about healers is they all had a esuna anyway. So why the hell did it need to take a role slot.
And protect could be removed entity from the game it wouldn't make any difference at all. So there's another role slot freed up -
06-29-2017, 03:30 AMtikiwiki
cleric stance swift e4e lucid and free slot for prot/rescue/surecast
largesse is weak e4e is better than it
prot on the scholar then they swap off to recue or sure to pull dps back to the boss or not get knocked back themselves
and if a fight requires esuna ans theres no scholar in the group then you can take esuna in slot 5 -
06-29-2017, 04:23 AMMuchmidgetI think part of it is they didn't want to maintain 3 different versions of the same skill. Similar things happened with Tanks' Rampart, or DPS ogcd stuns.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dzian
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06-29-2017, 06:01 AMRiyshnEsuna, yes. As well as Lucid Dreaming (Shroud of Saints, Luminiferous Aether, Aetherflow nerf). And Largesse (Divine Seal, Synastry nerf, Fey Illumination nerf). And Break (Stone, Stella, Miasma nerf). 4/10 healer role skills had to be removed/nerfed from all healers to be put there. I am entirely convinced that they just ran out of ideas for the cross-roles and stole the skills to round out the number.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dzian
Honestly, Protect should just be made a WHM exclusive thing, and make it a short duration mitigation buff. Keeps it in the game for flavor reason like Yoshi-P wanted, and stops all damage in fights from having to be scaled up to account for the assumption of having it. -
06-29-2017, 06:39 AMPonderaThis is exactly why skill pruning is, and always will be, a horrible horrible idea. They start off and design a system that works, like how Scholar had Aetherflow and energy drain, and White Mage had the Shroud of Saints. Both were part of that class' identity and individuality, though they both fulfilled a singular function: MP restoration. There was no need to change this. Then they started thinking about how to "streamline" things, and now Shroud of Saints has been given to all healer classes and Aetherflow has been nerfed to accomodate Scholar's access to it. Protect is now an ability that can be skipped, despite the fact that, as you said, all the fights are tuned to tanks having 15% more defense than they would otherwise.Esuna is optional, but there are a number of fights where it is mandatory to have it, removing doom stacks for instance, or poison themed bosses. I'm really glad I found that macro because, without it, healers would be a pretty big mess right now. I REALLY hope we don't have to go through this once every expansion...Quote:
Originally Posted by Riyshn
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06-29-2017, 08:09 AMYuyuka3Then why keep rez, though. It's the same on all three healers, too, even more so now that it can't be cross-roled by PLD anymore and they thus replased the (already stupidly useless, considering it had never been a problem to make it usable in battle for Archanist, ever) battle res trait WHM and AST got slapped with with something else... or did they? I don't even know anymore... anyway, the only things different are name and animation. If they moved Esuna into job actions, why not rez, too?Quote:
Originally Posted by Muchmidget
(Please don't kill me for the question, I feel Esuna should have stayed with each healer naturally, too, lol)
Riyshn, don't forget that Divine Seal aka Largesse got nerfed, too. Longer CD and less potency increase. Double hit to WHM in that department. Plus, it was one of our best job skills... Agree with you 100% on the rest, though.Quote:
Originally Posted by Riyshn
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06-29-2017, 11:21 AMGeminaYou're stuck regardless because you can't swap role skills during battle. The macro, while useful still has some constraints. I already mentioned that you can't switch while engaged with an enemy, but you also can't switch if either ability in the macro are on cooldown, even outside combat. The last constraint is protect is the only viable skill you can swap in, along with no longer being able to cast it if someone falls during a boss fight.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pondera
Despite these constraints, it's still a pretty cool way around the new system to get an extra skill. It's clunky, but effective.
Speaking of eye4eye in particular, I crossed it as WHM during 3.0 because well, we didn't have a lot of options anyway. I still use it now, but I don't like it. It doesn't feel like a healer ability; it feels like a SCH ability. It's tied to deployment tactics for crying out loud! Same goes for using Largesse and Lucid Dreaming on SCH. These two abilities make SCH play more like WHM, and I'm over here thinking, WTF SE?
I think both cross class and role skills need to go away. Each healer should have their own versions of fundamental abilities like Protect and Esuna. So long as additional skills remain mandatory by the meta, they have no place as selectable skills, they should simply be a part of that role's tool kit. Period. The devs need a dedicated, career healer who knows WTF as part of the team that is designing this stuff. Our healers are more out of balance than ever. -
06-30-2017, 12:55 AMty_taurus
I don't take Largesse for SCH or AST and take E4E instead. My viewpoint on Largesse is that there's nothing in the game that requires that additional healing if I'm geared, and I just don't go into fights I'm not geared for. It alleviates some MP usage in certain situations, but there's only so much HP I can restore before I hit that player's cap.
For SCH, E4E synergies with DT still which makes that particular skill more useful along with adlo shields.
For AST, I already have a 10-15% buff to my healing output that just exists on me at all times thanks to my sects. Do I really need to push it another 20% if I'm doing my job properly? -
06-30-2017, 02:49 AMFadingMoonI play my job properly and I see value in Largesse. Sometimes tank mass pull and dont pop a single CD. Sometimes you will have one or both dps die from standing in AOE with lots of aoe damage going out. I don't always use Largeese, but I do like having it as an option.Quote:
Originally Posted by ty_taurus
You can't complain about a stronger heal if it saves you mp/ allows more dps uptime. For me personally It has more value as a role slot than some of the other ones but I run swift,dream,eye4eye, largeese, and last slot can be protect that will be swapped out for esuna or w.e skill is needed.
61-70 dungeons you almost dont need esuna in ANY of them, but maybe one. You need esuna if you are doing outside content though.
Cleric is such a weak increase for a stupid long CD that it's not really worth it imo, but damage is damage I guess.
Rescue has a wack laggy animation but it can have some usage in the EX.
so yeah.. Largeese is better as a choice than some of the other ones regardless if you ACTUALLY need it or not. -
06-30-2017, 03:48 AMty_taurus
I'm not saying Largesse isn't useful, I'm just saying it's not necessary. With my play style, I'd rather stay on top of my healing by paying attention to what attacks are coming beforehand and responding early with healing. I don't need Largesse to do that.
E4E could reduce the overall damage received. As an AST, for example, I could potentially let my HoTs heal through the damage even more during E4E. This would give me more time to do other things.
The fact that both these actions are not necessary, but helpful to different play styles is what I believe makes them great cross-role actions. This is unlike abilities like Protect, Esuna, Swiftcast, and Lucid Dreaming which are not optional benefits directed toward different play styles, but requirements that actually take away the freedom that you would think the cross-role system would provide.
They're also different from actions like Cleric Stance, Break, Surecast, and Rescue which are all laughably weak. -
06-30-2017, 03:49 AMMuchmidgetI assume the reason was to keep the battle rez utility for arcanist/SMN. They can't really add it as a cross-role for all DPS casters; we only have 1 without a battle rez for now (BLM) but there may be more in the future. So it makes sense to me to keep this one separated.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yuyuka3
Additionally, you don't want a healer to have the option to skip Raise from cross-role.....