Sage

[ty_taurus]

Sage and AST both lookin spicy imo.

WHM and SCH are kind of meh. Holy 2 looks nice.

It'll be nice to finally have a new healer to play after all this time. I just hope it doesn't suffer from the problem AST had when it came out of potencies and MP regens being way too low. I still remember needing to pour literally everything i had into double pulls back in the day to keep the tank alive. If a dps was taking unnecessary damage they were dead.

I feel this. To me, I get the vibe that WHM and SCH are being thrown under the bus in order for AST and SGE to shine (WHM less so than SCH, but its still basically being ignored in the grand scheme of things).

WHM's new totem action has a lot of potential to be interesting, but it doesn't seem that any of WHM's issues are being addressed other than weaving. Holy II seems like it might have some potential outside of AoE based on its interactions with the new totem, but generating lilies without creating new ways to spend them seems like they completely wiffed on the core design flaws of the lily system. While it has so much potential, I'm legitimately gobsmacked they supposedly did nothing to build from the foundation they created in Shadowbringers. What's more, since Glare now has a 1.5 second cast time, the current solution of using lilies to weave is now largely obsolete, meaning it will be even harder to spend lilies outside of savage/ultimate prog. Mobility-dense segments might still encourage their use, but WHM doesn't have enough OGCD actions to warrant sacking your DPS for a double weave window. Also who knows if Afflatus Misery's potency is at least getting buffed to keep up with Glare II, though I'm honestly doubtful that it will, meaning afflatus heals become an even worse DPS loss. There's a lot underdetermined in regards to specifics like potencies, but what we've seen so far doesn't inspire confidence. Let's pray the media tour makes me eat my words.

To be honest, I'm kind of hoping SCH crashes and burns. It sucks to say, and I don't want SCH players to be unhappy, but sometimes you need a colossal failure in order to slap the design team awake to the fact that SCH feels like a hollow husk of what it used to be, potencies and efficiency be damned. It's sloppy, it has no cohesiveness, the Fey Gauge is a joke, and it's not even a very good "barrier healer" outside of Savage/Ultimate where Adlo and Succor actually become tactically useful tools for certain mechanics. If we want to talk about "not inspiring confidence," I don't think there's a worse way to lead off a job's design philosophy than how they introduced SCH's slide during the live letter. "We don't know what to do with it." The sad thing is, I'm willing to bet it will still be a top-performing healer despite its dumpster fire kit.

Meanwhile, AST is looking to have a lot of cool new toys to play with. Some players are complaining that WHM's totem is just Earthly Star and the new "Starshower" action is just Assize, but I disagree. At a glance at least, there's a bit more nuance to them and potentially different effects. The new/old Lord and Lady are looking a lot better, both not consuming an existing arcanum card alongside their effects. I think it will come down to how you acquire either. If they're random again, I'd say that would be not ideal, though if that have charges now then you can at least sit on the Lady and wait for a good time to use her for at least a little while. They didn't mention the card effects so it's possible they're staying the same. I know that doesn't sound great to a lot of players, but depending on how the new seal system operates, it could be possible that card identity might actually come into play moreso with how those seal combos work. It could, in theory, indirectly give the cards identity into which seals they have and what benefits those grant you. It's really hard to say for sure since we don't have any specifics, but I'm a bit more optimistic than I am for WHM and SCH. Now here's to hoping Sleeve Draw feels better than Shadowbringers.

SGE meanwhile is stealing the show. Lots of really well-designed actions from the look of things. Icarus, Pneuma, Phlegma, Eucrasia, Cardia... It seems like, for the first time literally ever, that they're actually looking at the contrast between GCD DPS potency and contrasting that value against some of your other GCD options and trying to actually incentivize us to do other things over spamming Dosis all the time. One of the things that I found agonizing about the designers' approach to healing was that they clearly wanted us to DPS less but without increasing damage output or creating incentives behind other GCD options to make us want to stop. Now they are, and if they can latch onto that like a tick and suck that concept dry, we could be in for more positive changes in the future. I was initially disappointed in Toxicon II's implementation from what we've been able to translate from the demonstration, but as others have pointed out, it's likely that the DPS action we didn't see during the last live letter that Alphinaud uses 3 times during the benchmark is likely a single target Adder's Sting/Serpent's Fang (whatever it's called) spender. If gaining those stacks is indeed gained from our SGE Adlo being attacked/broken, at that's at least DPS neutral, that we'll have accomplished more than I had ever hoped for in regards to healers. Sure, they might be blatantly stealing from Blackest Night, but I'm certainly not complaining.

All-in-all, I really kind of hope that AST and SGE pop off and WHM/SCH numbers plummet. I really don't want those mains to feel like their job is ruined, but sometimes you need to burn down what's broken to create fertile land for something new and fresh to come in, and that might be exactly what we need in order for the designers to see what we want in our healers. I mentioned this before, but we obviously don't have the specifics on each job yet, and that ultimately means there's more that we don't know than what we do. For all we know, everything I said is hilariously inaccurate, but we'll just have to wait and see I suppose. Fingers crossed people.