The Case for the Spear

[NocturniaUzuki]

@Galvuu

As I mentioned in the OP, the speedrunner group that you are a part of base everything on a plan of perfection. However, perfect is not realistic and even in these skill-cap parties you're a part of, there will be mistakes. There is a certain level range in which prioritizing DPS follows the logic laid out by speedrunners, but people far too often forget about situations below that level range.

Also, while the video I linked was a PLD/AST/DRG/RDM comp, I've done it with many different compositions. Frankly, I don't care about compositions whatsoever. I adapt to whatever is thrown at me because it's fun. However, I have also done such runs without the PLD (whose Clemency takes a huge load off the healer) and without a RDM or any caster for that matter (so I had no quasi-healer to back me up nor casters to Mana Shift me).

Anyways, I'm going to take a break from responding on here and actually play the game for a bit, since I haven't actually done anything but write forum posts and make dinner since I got home 4 hours ago!

[Fortune_Cookie]

In a lot of the miracle comeback runs I've had, it hasn't ended up in a clear just because I managed to pull us back from a situation where 6/8 players were dead.

At the risk of quoting this unfairly out of context, to my mind the mention of "miracle comeback" hints at the real problem with determining the value of a card like Spear. It's just not possible, in any sensible way, to measure the statistical contribution to successful clears from Spear.

What tends to stick in our minds therefore are stand-out moments, near wipes and last-man-standing kills. We remember them because we're emotionally invested and we tend to attribute the success to our heroic actions simply because that's how humans work. You may readily recall that one time when it was just you and the tank and the boss hit the floor just as your mp ran out. And you attribute that to your judicious use of Spear earlier in the fight. How often does that really happen? Do you go and check the logs to work out whether the Spear really did result in extra casts that were instrumental in getting the kill?

In short, how do you avoid the confirmation & self-serving bias that these situations are naturally rife with? Do you keep track of all the runs when nothing special happens that Spear might help with?

In contrast Balance has a much more quantifiable effect. Because of that I'm not limited to my own biased feeling of what the success of a run was really down to - I can go on fflogs to get an objective sense of what dps buffs do based on tens of thousands of runs.

I can certainly appreciate that unusual situations (soloing etc) might place more emphasis on otherwise overshadowed abilities. But in most standard progression or farm scenarios the certain benefit of a damage buff ought to win. More damage is always good and always happens pretty often...

[Fealow]

If the whole "miracle comeback" thing is a supposed and relevant use of the spear why not make it be that but a more reliable and better version.

For example:

Replace it with a card that gives the player 10% increase to healing received.

If you consider removing it or replacing it, either option results in SE having to go back and modify lore elements of the game inside of job quests as well as outside of them. Unless they can think of some other buff that matches the spear's lore they simply won't replace it and removing it entirely is out of the question all things considered.

[NocturniaUzuki]

At the risk of quoting this unfairly out of context, to my mind the mention of "miracle comeback" hints at the real problem with determining the value of a card like Spear. It's just not possible, in any sensible way, to measure the statistical contribution to successful clears from Spear.

What tends to stick in our minds therefore are stand-out moments, near wipes and last-man-standing kills. We remember them because we're emotionally invested and we tend to attribute the success to our heroic actions simply because that's how humans work. You may readily recall that one time when it was just you and the tank and the boss hit the floor just as your mp ran out. And you attribute that to your judicious use of Spear earlier in the fight. How often does that really happen? Do you go and check the logs to work out whether the Spear really did result in extra casts that were instrumental in getting the kill?

In short, how do you avoid the confirmation & self-serving bias that these situations are naturally rife with? Do you keep track of all the runs when nothing special happens that Spear might help with?

In contrast Balance has a much more quantifiable effect. Because of that I'm not limited to my own biased feeling of what the success of a run was really down to - I can go on fflogs to get an objective sense of what dps buffs do based on tens of thousands of runs.

I can certainly appreciate that unusual situations (soloing etc) might place more emphasis on otherwise overshadowed abilities. But in most standard progression or farm scenarios the certain benefit of a damage buff ought to win. More damage is always good and always happens pretty often...

I can understand where that train of thought is coming from. It certainly is true that we often remember things better than they actually were. I've gone back and looked at videos of some of those "miracle comebacks" and they don't seem as amazing when I'm watching them and seeing all my mistakes. However, one thing I can tell you is that, in many of these situations, the Spear did make all the difference. Sometimes I do overuse it - especially when I'm rusty. For instance I just did a few runs of Royal Menagerie again after 4 days of not playing. I held Spears quite often but, especially with the discussions in this thread weighing on my mind, didn't feel it was all that effective. That being said, the parties were quite good and I only encountered one disaster, which I pulled through quickly enough that the Spear was helpful, but not necessary.

It hasn't been "that one time" where I had a miracle comeback and attributed it to the Spear though. Nor has it only been in that moment that I felt the Spear made the difference. I've gone back, looked at videos, and seen that if I had not been using the Spear, I would not have had a skill like Lightspeed up when I needed it, or that my MP would have been drained into oblivion if I had not reduced the cooldown of Lucid Dreaming. I will admit though that I don't do the sort of math that people have done for DPS. But then, the DPS math is based on a context of perfection, so it has its own bias there.

Balance also has bias in how people view it though. It may be a more quantifiable effect, but people tend to believe it has a greater effect than it really does. In reality, by my math at least, it should work out to an under 10% clear speed increase. If you're doing hundreds of runs, it starts to make a significant difference. But just 10-20 runs? It might save 10-20 minutes. Now, at the level of farm parties, I doubt there would be enough situations in which the Spear actually prevented a wipe to make the claim that Spear actually increases overall clear speed over time more than Balance, via allowing for clear consistency. However, as soon as you start looking at rough runs, those situations become more common. Eventually you get down to the point where the Spear regularly makes a difference. If you watched that video I posted awhile ago of the 4-man Royal Menagerie, you will have noticed that it is most definitely NOT a run done by an elite group of players. Just off the top of my head, I think the DRG dies twice, the RDM once, and the tank even dies once. When you're looking at runs where not only is the healer naturally strained in general by solo healing, but the members of the party are dying and getting hit by avoidable mechanics, you have to pop cooldowns very often. Sometimes Lightspeed will have to be used in place of Swiftcast to double-cast a heal just to keep the tank alive during Akh Morn (because in order to save a DPS who ate the Earth Breath DoT you had to divert focus from the tank, causing the tank's HP to be too low to survive Akh Morn without a double-cast Benefic II). At that point, Lightspeed is on cooldown, but the chance of Shinryu casting Aerial Blast (which often necessitates the use of Lightspeed to keep the tank/party alive through it due to the constant cast interruptions) before the cooldown is off is quite high. Reducing the cooldown doesn't guarantee that it will be off cooldown by the time Aerial Blast is next used, but it does increase the chances. Now consider that during the fight, the healer is forced to use cooldowns to prevent wipes like that more than once, and the chance of the Spear having saved the party from a wipe continues to go up. If it even saves a run once every 10 runs, and the cost of a wipe is 10 minutes, then suddenly it's on par with Balance. And eventually, if the healer's allies have little enough mechanical competence, it can reach a point at which so many cooldowns are necessary that Spear regularly prevents a wipe.

Anyways, I need to stop there since it's getting way too late. Hopefully that makes some sense, despite being written past my bedtime!

[NocturniaUzuki]

If the whole "miracle comeback" thing is a supposed and relevant use of the spear why not make it be that but a more reliable and better version.

For example:

Replace it with a card that gives the player 10% increase to healing received.

If you consider removing it or replacing it, either option results in SE having to go back and modify lore elements of the game inside of job quests as well as outside of them. Unless they can think of some other buff that matches the spear's lore they simply won't replace it and removing it entirely is out of the question all things considered.

I'd argue that +10% healing received does less to enable comebacks than the cooldown reduction. I feel like you're thinking of "comebacks" as: "Oh crap, the entire party is at 10% HP, I need powerheals!" Meanwhile, I consider comebacks "Oh crap, it's just me and a SAM; I'm tanking the boss as a healer, need to raise a tank without dying in the mean time, and also need to have at least 4 players up to survive the next AoE that will happen within one minute." In my own experience, what tends to be more important than actual healing potency is rate of healing. An extra 10% potency (or even 20%) isn't going to help when you need an extra 100% and are getting interrupted constantly. In these situations your only options are oGCD heals with cooldowns, burning a ____ ton of MP spamming Aspected Benefic, or using Swiftcast or Lightspeed to doublecast Benefic II. That has repercussions though. You use a lot of MP really fast, and if you need those skills again soon and they're on cooldown, you'll end up wiping.

Now then, bedtime for real...

[Lunafreya]

Spear is a trash card for the most part. The only time it is good is to use it on yourself or the other healer. It doesn't take an essay to realize this.

[Fealow]

I'd argue that +10% healing received...

That was not really my point. It was an example to suggest that we should be talking about how to improve it because as I pointed out SE are not going to remove it (like some folks seem to want) and they can't simply change the buff without it matching the lore as it is tied to in game content.

The card we pull should have two viable/efficient uses at the time of pulling it, Spear does not have the same number of uses when compared to the other cards. Extended RR is low priority if not the lowest in just about any situation. Every card and card combination of RR and spread (excluding spear) does more than what you can do if you happen to draw a spear into that mix.

We should Discuss a fitting replacement for the Spear rather than if it has a niche or is useless.

[Ersahi]

I think the OP is off mark.

The problem with Spear is that it takes too much coordination to use effectively. I can slap a dps with balance and they're going to do more damage regardless if they notice my buff or not, a tank is going to take less damage with bole regardless of what else they do, and a healer is going to find they have more mp than they thought if they're oblivious to what I'm doing. For spear to be effective I have have the stars align to have the card ready to go when someone has enough cooldowns for it to be effective, and they have to realize that I hit them with spear and how they should take advantage of the fact.

Personally, I think it would be better if the spear shaved a flat amount of time off of skills that were on cooldown. If you were waiting for one or two skills to come off of cooldown to unload another opener, and an ast hit you with spear and you were 5 or 10 seconds ahead of where you were it wouldn't require a huge amount of coordination.

[MoroMurasaki]

I read your manifesto OP! It did make me reevaluate why I think of Spear the way that I do. That being said it did not change my mind and I'd like to tell you why in two parts; healer cooldown management and healers interacting with RNG.

Spear is, ultimately, part of an "Oh, sh*t" series of buttons you might press to try to save the day and it could actually help turn things around, eapecially when used on a WHM who burns things like Benediction, Tetra and Assize in that timeframe. The problem with "Oh, sh*t" buttons is that you don't want to have to use them that way, most healers agree that you shouldn't leave a potent oGCD on cooldown for when you may need it (outside of something like blind progression) when you may never run into a situation where it becomes "usable".

Take Benediction for example. In any random pug group dungeon 50+ I can either use Bene on cooldown (more or less) to allow me to DPS my heart out for a while or sit on it through the whole dungeon and miss out on potentially hundreds of thousands of HP healed on the tank and a fair chunk of party DPS. I know not every oGCD is this potent but Bene is really maybe the best candidate for Spear usage in the game all things considered becauae it is so strong and has what is still quite a cooldown.

Any healer worth their salt (no pun intended)... (Okay, you got me, pun totally intended, we can be quite the salty bunch) will tell you that using Bene every 3 minutes or so is the preferred course of action here. Yes it is an amazing thing to pop when the poop hits the fan but if the poop and the fan never meet it's just an amazing ability being wasted.

You're probably saying "But Moro this is dumb, Bene is not the Spear!" and you would be right. But the Spear isn't Bene in this situation, it is improper oGCD management. I am by no means a worlds first-er but I do care about playing sub-optimally because it feels like I am not only wasting my time but also the time of the other fine people I am dragging through a dungeon with me. To sit on my oGCD's when I could be using them to keep things rolling seems silly. I know WHM and AST are night and day when it comes to healer DPS potential but they are not night and day when it comes to overall DPS brought to a group - mine comes from oCGD heals mixed into a buttload of personal DPS and yours comes from Balance and, to a lesser extent, Arrow.

This brings me to my final point. A Spear is not a Balanace.

At this point in the game there is no reason to beat around the bush, AST kinda sucks at personal DPS but that's okay because you can buff group DPS to make up for what you lack. If you are Spearing yourself you aren't just decreasing your cooldowns you are also lowering your contribution to the party if that "Oh, sh*t" series of buttons don't get pressed. If you are in a decent group and not doing blind progression chances are you have no reason to burn all your cooldowns at once. Even if you are an AoE Balance could have contributed so much to party DPS that you could have avoided that situation in the first place by killing the things.

If the Spear were anything other than RNG based cooldown reduction it might have a place in a healer toolkit but it is not. As a WHM main in SB I know a fair bit about healer RNG cooldown reduction and take it from someone who has had it forced upon them it is not something that any healers should have to deal with. We are the planners, the strategists and to an extent the puppetmasters of our groups and to plan around a 'maybe' is not just doing a disservice to yourself but also to your party.

In summary is cooldown reduction on healers good? Yes. But it can not be RNG based, it can not come at the cost of missing any of the other much more useful AST cards and it can not only seem potent enough to matter if you sit on all your cooldowns anyways because in most situations that is just poor healing.

Again this is all situational. On my primarily blind run of Bardam's the first time I don't think I used Bene once or Largresse in a boss fight because I was waiting to save the day with them. In those situations (reliable) cooldown reduction would be great. The majority of content being run though? No, you are better served rotating buffs and oGCD heals any day of the week and if you're doing that you will never burn enough cooldowns during a Spear to make it worthwhile.

I really do think your post is well thought out and stimulating, thank you for making me think about these things!

[Kabooa]

Spear is a bad card because Balance and Arrow exist.

Cards that -do not depend on any scenario to get a benefit from-

More damage is -always useful-.

More TP, more MP, not so much. Bole's damage reduction is in the same boat, because as a rule, -raid defensive cooldowns can't be necessary-.

That leaves Spear. Which is a conditional gain, since casting Spear on someone who has already used their abilities has no effect.

So long as Balance and Arrow exist in their current form, the other cards will always be second class.