Can we delete Seraph, Dissipation, Excog and Sacred Soil? Some ideas on top of it...

[Shurrikhan]

it was removed from cross class. i don't know when exactly, but by heavensward whm no longer had access to it

Ahh, gotcha. I was looking through screens from ARR and despite loving to have DoTs, I didn't see it in my WHM bars. Thought it might have been like Fracture on DRG (below filler ppgcd). That at least explains it's absence from any of many more HW screenshots, though. Thanks.

[Sebazy]

Shoot, weird that it's not in any of the old guides. Could that just be because of its potency?

I think it was largely down to the combination of dots being largely undervalued for certain jobs early in ARR's life with how difficult they were to track in the days before parsing. That coupled with more of a focus on MP conservation and a comparative lack of Tank survivability back then meant you didn't really see that many people using it. In the video I was hoping to link I only remember casting it on the opener and during the heart phase for example, a stark contrast to how things are today!

For the curious, it wasn't a day and night DPS gain. One Thunder cast on WHM did 215 potency for the GCD cast whereas Stone II was 170 at the time if I'm remembering correctly. The real beauty of it was that it meant you had 130 potency of dots ticking away whilst we were busy pre casting and canceling Cure

It got removed really early on, either 2.1 or 2.2 from memory.

[Renathras]

Man, I really don't know what to tell you if you think playing WHM is even remotely as involved today as it was back in ARR/HW..

I just...laid it all out for you why. WHM in ARR/HW was more clunky because you had to refresh DoTs more frequently, but your HoTs also lasted longer (Medica 2 in particular) and you had to interrupt your Stonespam for GCD heals - Regen is a GCD heal. Fluid Aura did token damage, but the bigger problem was the knockback which would often cause problems with tanking, so you couldn't use it in various fights because of it messing up the tank gathering trash, and where you could use it, it was basically a use on CD damage button, which makes it equivalent to Assize now. Hence Assize inherits that "complexity".

The DoTs came up a lot more, but that was, again, clunk and annoyance (especially for people who hate DoTs), not a marker of skill or enjoyment. I did like rolling Regens on the party more frequently, though. I kind of wish Regen upgraded into an oGCD at some point as I love the spell and the idea of it, but the cost for using it vs the benefit is kind of meh most of the time. So this still comes back to "we had to use GCD heals more". And as noted, Cleric was...Cleric.

As far as your "think and pay attention to", I would say that's due to encounter design, not the kit. Other than having wonky DoT timers that didn't like up forcing you to squint at the Bosses's list of debuffs to watch for yours more carefully. Which is something I find truly obnoxious (and is one reason I hate DoTs and DoT focused classes in general - I've never seen a game with a good UI design for DoT tracking)

Me personally, I absolutely hate DoTs, no matter the game. Having a second one made healers more annoying, not more engaging. And I hate that we don't have a SINGLE healer in this game that doesn't use one. But that's neither here nor there.

The issue is you're counting only GCD button presses (for the most part), I'm including oGCDs. We weave a LOT more than we used to, meaning we have a higher APM than we did back then.

EDIT:

It got removed really early on, either 2.1 or 2.2 from memory.

Ah, that explains why I didn't remember it. I started in...probably 2.2. Whatever patch was just BEFORE ROG/NIN was added to the game (about the time I got to Northern Thanalan, I got inundated with party invites because 7 NIN groups were trying to power level via FATEs and needed healers, so I got powered from around 43 or so to level 50 one Saturday afternoon from that), and I wouldn't have had THM leveled at that point anyway (I didn't level it to 15 until I wanted SCH/SMN in 2.4 or so, and I didn't level it higher until I realized that Swiftcast could be gained that way, and that was probably in 2.5 when I started branching into some organized group content and figured out I needed it/it was a thing.)

So I can amend what I said before to "As long as I've been playing, which was mid-ARR, we only had the two DoTs", then, to be more accurate.

I love esoteric game history, so that's kind of cool to know. I still remember the glorious day they added Stoneskin 2 to the game...and the terrible day they removed Protect (and also Stoneskin) and didn't even give it to us as a short duration defensive CD. To this day, I feel that Stoneskin should be a lower level Divine Benison that just upgrades to Benison at some point, and that Protect/Shell should be in the game as BASICALLY what Aquaveil is today.

[Shurrikhan]

I think it was largely down to the combination of dots being largely undervalued for certain jobs early in ARR's life with how difficult they were to track in the days before parsing.

We may have undervalued (and then overvalued) DoT job's In-practice damage for a while, but DoTs' total potency was fully understood from week 1.

[Sebazy]

I love esoteric game history, so that's kind of cool to know. I still remember the glorious day they added Stoneskin 2 to the game...and the terrible day they removed Protect (and also Stoneskin) and didn't even give it to us as a short duration defensive CD. To this day, I feel that Stoneskin should be a lower level Divine Benison that just upgrades to Benison at some point, and that Protect/Shell should be in the game as BASICALLY what Aquaveil is today.

Honestly a lot of that is why many people are so frustrated at this point. A few small and simple changes would be such a big difference for the healer roles.

We may have undervalued (and then overvalued) DoT job's In-practice damage for a while, but DoTs' total potency was fully understood from week 1.

I'm not so sure, SMN was viewed as pretty bad back then. Thunder getting removed was a nerf aimed at SMN and it was about this time that people started figuring out how good it's DPS actually was. Even post nerf, our SMN was a lock in on that raid slot by that point.

The first few months were very very strange though, the early meta was to CC in dungeons and kill things one by one whilst BCob statics wanted BRDs over anything and everything. Pretty sure my group ran 3 BRDs for T1 and T2. It was all a bit crazy before everything got mathed out properly :d

I'd better stop derailing this thread with weird history though, it's better than the bickering elsewhere but it's still a bit OT!

[Icecylee]

Managing the annoying parts, "the clunk", *is* what made the job more involved and engaging, though...? You're certainly entitled to prefer things as they are, but you can't really say pushing more varied buttons more often while tracking two separate timers wasn't also more work.

I didn't bother bringing up ogcds again because as you stated, assize more or less fills the space space fluid aura did (tho it's on a longer cooldown so, again, hitting less buttons). And as for the ogcd heals you're weaving in more often... that's because I was speaking from a more casual perspective with dungeon bosses or normal mode trial/raids (ie the bulk of the content in the game, and the content the game most wants you to do repeatedly for years on end in roulettes). And you don't have much of any reason to do anything other than slap down the occasional asylum to cover the dinky little raidwides they do in the vast majority of them. you don't get a reward for keeping your party overhealed, but you *do* clear stuff faster if you're trying to optimize damage, so you have a lot more reason to engage with that side of the kit unless you have a spectacularly bad party.

For what it's worth though I do somewhat agree that this is partially an encounter design issue being at odds with the job design one. But considering encounter design hasn't changed a ton in the last.... three-ish expansions, I feel a lot more confident that it's the job kits that need adjusting rather than the fights themselves. It's also a lot less work to make 4 jobs a little less boring and make sense within the context of 14s encounters, rather than trying to change several expansions worth of content to make sense for the current healer kits (especially since they already more or less work for all the dps and tanks, and there's a ton more of those than healers)

[Renathras]

<I...think you were replying to me?>

I mean, yes, but no. Does having to fight SCH's clunk to get the most out of the job make it more work than not having to fight the clunk? Yes. But does it make it more engaging (or fun)? Not really, though this DOES depend on who you ask (as some people DO find clunk fun, but that's not universal to all people, with many finding fighting the clunk to be un-fun and something they more put up with than enjoy)

I guess the reason I find oGCDs important is that you aren't REALLY pressing 2,1,1,1,1,1,1 in most encounters. You ARE, in fact, hitting far more buttons. AST's rotation is 2,1,1,1,1,1,... and yet, AST has one of the highest APMs in the came (probably THE highest when we factor in target selection as an "action"). An AST's fingers are dancing all over their keyboard, not merely pressing two buttons. In Aldazaal's (newest dungeon), I burn a lot of my CDs on SCH to heal. I do so to avoid having to GCD heal, mind you, but some of the double trash packs can hit tanks pretty hard and catch unawares DPSers with their AOEs. I find myself pretty consistently rolling through my oGCDs and occasionally throwing out Aetherflow healing. If I wasn't doing that, I absolutely would have to be GCD healing. So I feel it's fair that we include those button presses AS button presses. Because that isn't automatic (other than Eos' Embrace) and actually have to be done by the player.

That is, while it's more than possible to get through 4 mans and some 8 mans (Ex/Sav) if you have a well executed healing play without using any GCD heals...it's NOT possible to get through them without using ANY heals. So those button presses count, I think.

And yeah, obviously we agree on the design thing in the present. Though I don't understand why you think they have to backdate stuff? When they normally make changes to things, they only do it going forward. The only "backdated" change I can think of offhand is Orbonne made a bit easier and removing the 2 tanks from the first (first two?) CT raids, as there used to be 6 tanks in them. Can you think of other changes they made backwards? I don't see why they'd have to now, either. They'd just change encounters going forward and give boosted echo for old content if it was somehow made problematic, but it likely wouldn't be.

EDIT: That is, say they made healer oGCDs weaker and made all encounters from 7.0 forward have more consistent unavoidable damage (like, say, WoW) that required some GCD heals to patch people up. There's zero reason for them to go back to old content and change it, since most content can be cleared without needing it (at worst, people clearing some level 70 and 80 Savages/Ultimates at level might have to cast GCD heals a bit more frequently, but probably not even that), and if, somehow, it DID cause a problem, they'd just slap echo on for that old content like they did with the stat squish. The stat squish IS a case of what you're saying - some major change that would affect old content - and that was how they solved that problem.

So it doesn't seem like that's actually an issue at all.

I've seen several people mention that as somehow a reason not to change encounter designs going forward, but it really really isn't, and I don't understand people continuing to bring it up since it isn't a sticking point in any way. /shrug

[Icecylee]

I've seen several people mention that as somehow a reason not to change encounter designs going forward, but it really really isn't, and I don't understand people continuing to bring it up since it isn't a sticking point in any way. /shrug

So the reason people frequently make comments like that, is because in this long unending conversation about "healers being boring", there's generally two solutions: one, giving the healers more stuff to do during their copious amounts of downtime (and the simplest way to do that is with more dps actions, tho if they wanted to get creative they could play around with more buffs/debuffs/whatever) ie change the job design a little bit, OR, they could change the encounter design to require a lot more intensive healing. The first solution fixes the problem of "the people frequently complaining about being bored on this role" for all the content that exist without any extra effort. If they radically changed how they approached encounter design in 7.0, however, that wouldn't do a single thing to fix the Boredom Issue for all of the 2.0-6.5 content. And the game is always, constantly trying to convince you to run older content. So it's not *really* a solution to only change things going forward, they'd have to go back and change everything that already exists, too, which isn't... terribly practical (else they'd still have people making the exact same complaints anytime they needed to do a roulette for any reason...) when you compare how much more effort the second one would take.


For the other stuff, yeah sure fun is definitely subjective. Things can definitely be engaging while also being annoying tho, it doesn't have to mean it's fun. AST cards are like that for me, personally. A lot of extra busy work for a small reward you can't really see/feel unless you're running third party tools.

[Renathras]

So the reason people frequently make comments like that, is because in this long unending conversation about "healers being boring", there's generally two solutions: one, giving the healers more stuff to do during their copious amounts of downtime (and the simplest way to do that is with more dps actions, tho if they wanted to get creative they could play around with more buffs/debuffs/whatever) ie change the job design a little bit, OR, they could change the encounter design to require a lot more intensive healing. The first solution fixes the problem of "the people frequently complaining about being bored on this role" for all the content that exist without any extra effort. If they radically changed how they approached encounter design in 7.0, however, that wouldn't do a single thing to fix the Boredom Issue for all of the 2.0-6.5 content. And the game is always, constantly trying to convince you to run older content. So it's not *really* a solution to only change things going forward, they'd have to go back and change everything that already exists, too, which isn't... terribly practical (else they'd still have people making the exact same complaints anytime they needed to do a roulette for any reason...) when you compare how much more effort the second one would take.


For the other stuff, yeah sure fun is definitely subjective. Things can definitely be engaging while also being annoying tho, it doesn't have to mean it's fun. AST cards are like that for me, personally. A lot of extra busy work for a small reward you can't really see/feel unless you're running third party tools.

I think the problem with your argument is you see your solution as a zero-loss, total-gain solution. Your "solution" causes a whole host of problems. People on the lower side of mid tier will be unable to clear content. There will be a lot more infighting in the community about the "right" way to play healers even than there is now. People that actually LIKE healing (that is, refilling health bars from damage) will be left in the cold with their complaints unaddressed. People that like the current system of healing will find themselves expelled from it, told they're doing it wrong, or attacked for being bad healers when they are competent ones today. All future content will have to be based around healers having these expanded toolkits, which means ALL PAST CONTENT will have to be rebalanced because either (a) healers will do too much damage or (b) healers won't have the downtime to heal more intensive past content while still managing that DPS kit and so the group will be unable to clear.

So what you're asking for would require a total rework of all past content.

EDIT:

It doesn't fix the overall problem. It fixes a VERY NARROW subset of the problem (some people being bored) while creating no less than 3 and as many as 5 new problems, would require all 2.0-6.5 content to be remade anyway (the thing you say it wouldn't require, it actually WOULD require), and this would require far more work than simply making future encounters have more frequent tick damage to deal with.

I agree with the last, though; fun is subjective. Which is why I advocate a combined approach. That way, everyone gets something while not alienating existing players or destroying the current balance of the game and requiring past content to be reworked - which would have to be done based on your proposal.

[Sebazy]

All future content will have to be based around healers having these expanded toolkits, which means ALL PAST CONTENT will have to be rebalanced because either (a) healers will do too much damage or (b) healers won't have the downtime to heal more intensive past content while still managing that DPS kit and so the group will be unable to clear.

I disagree here. And there's a very good example in the game right now to demonstrate why.

Look at Sage's dps kit relative to the other 3 healers. At lower levels Sage vastly out DPSes the other healers, it has a 300 potency nuke from the get which is potentially more than double what the other healers have a times + it gets it's Assize clone at level 26.

In Level 50 content it's throwing around a 300 potency nuke, 400 potency oGCD on 45 seconds and a 40 potency dot.

By comparison WHM has a 190 potency nuke and a 50 potency dot (With 50 potency up front)
SCH has a 220 potency nuke, 40 potency dot and potentially 100-300 potency of EDs a minute (And no Chain yet)
AST has 150 potency nuke, 50 potency dot, it's cards and Astrodyne.

So yeah, right now in 50 sync content, if your DPS aren't somewhat organised and know what they are doing, a Sage is likely to doing literally double the damage of an AST right now.

You don't see people complaining about this because frankly, very few people care. Most level synced old content is a complete face roll at this point anyway. Look at how broken CT bosses are now and have been for years. As long as SE doesn't magically flip things the other way to the point where we no longer have enough healing coupled with them lasting long enough to actually do anything back, it's really not an issue at this stage. The content is already ruined anyway.

Lastly, it shouldn't really need to be said but I'll say it again.

ADDING MORE DEPTH TO A HEALER'S DPS KIT DOES NOT NEED TO EQUATE TO IT DOING MORE DAMAGE.

Please stop assuming this as it's then immediately taken and used as ammo to derail the idea when it simply has no relevance to what's being suggested.