[Sage] Fixing Toxikon

[ty_taurus]

I'm fine with giving a change to Toxikon II through another skill on a charge system, so it's only DPS Neutral under certain circumstances. In this case, it will allow actually accumulating the stacks for movement during combat without being a direct DPS loss. However... if you want Toxikon II to be DPS Neutral, you would also have to consider the amount of extra healing potency Sage will get from having to hardcast the heals without a DPS penalty, because it will effectively change their GCD healing into a roundabout way to oGCD heal like lilies do. For that to happen, the healing toolkit will have to be either considerably weaker to make room for this change at the current level, or it will be given as a trait at a later level to act as the new 'healing' skill.

Toxikon II isn't a completely bad mechanic for its purpose in the Sage toolkit. It currently functions like the healer's version of a mix between Reaper's Soulsow for downtime. You use it when you can't hit the enemy for whatever reason to be a DPS gain when you are forced to move a lot and can't hardcast. Having downtime to build stacks is a nice way to have some engagement to the job IMO because of how flexible Toxikon II can be for weaving and mobility purposes. It just feels more lacking since healers are basically looking at it as Dosis III or [DPS gauge mechanic] rather than Dosis III or Soulsow, but that's just a healer problem in general.

What Toxikon II currently offers is both mobility & double weave slots (such as pairing Krasis and Physis II in one GCD to get out your buffing skills asap rather than wait another GCD and to turn on your second healing buff or clip). This is important, because with more healing skills, double weaving oGCD skills together feels more and more important. Otherwise, you'd feel like you have too many skills to press instantly and it feels like bloat (which is what AST is suffering from, since they can't get double weaves outside of Lightspeed and Lightspeed has a fairly long cooldown while most of its toolkit is 60 seconds or shorter).

Phlegma has both a close ranged positional requirement and would rather be used under raid buffs when applicable, so the optimized usage is a bit more stricter. It just doesn't always align under a raid buff due to being a 45 second timer, but you'd ideally try to place it in... unless you would have to move and cannot slidecast, so you'd use an instant cast GCD rather than losing a GCD. This is where Toxikon II comes in when it's gained pre-pulled. Not only does it avoid having a lack of instant GCD DPS when moving large distances for long periods of time, but it also enhances / gives more flexibility to specifically double weave without using Phlegma outside of these windows, all while not having a close range requirement. The caveat is that it's not spammable unless you want to incur a DPS loss, so using it to prevent a loss of GCD DPS is important for optimizing gameplay.

However, I do agree that there are a lot more things that can be done to improve the generation of addersting because it's a very niche situation to be in. Only getting 3 adderstings for a very long fight if there's no transitions? Feels like the gauge gets underutilized in non-optimized scenarios.

Without affecting healing output too much, having 1 shield break in E. Diagnosis or 4 shields break in E. Prognosis to generate 1 addersting would be a nice change currently. Having Rhizomata generate both an addersgall and an addersting would also be great. Just lots of small QoL changes that would make the toolkit come together imo.

I would argue that this line kind of encapsulates my frustrations with Addersting as a resource in general. I cannot agree with saying it's a well-working system for a resource to, in many situations, be restricted to only being generated when there's literally nothing else to do. It's why Shadowbringers Improvisation on Dancer was such a bad tool conceptually and was reworked, for example--a different kind of tool, but one with the same core flaw. No one will ever be able to sell me on a resource who's only method of being generated is objectively a terrible waste of your time.

I see people mentioning generating Addersting in other ways such as through Rhizomata or Pepsis, but I feel like that's resigning Addersting to just be a glorified Ruin II for the rest of its existence, and I just don't want that. The promise of a potential way to actually encourage GCD healing for once in this game's forsaken existence, resulting in something that's satisfying and a core part of your gameplay should sound like a breath of fresh air for everyone, and to be fair, I really think it would be better for all players, casual, midcore, and hardcore alike, if this were encouraged more with all healers and not just Sage.

There's another thread on the forum that stumbled across a really fascinating video about retouching WHM's gameplay to be stronger, and one such suggestion was allowing GCD healing to proc "Diacloud" in a similar fashion to BLM's Thundercloud, for example.