Fixing Every Healer Job

[SirShady]

Scholar stuff

Yeah, honestly at this point I think the faerie gauge should just be removed, totally reworked, or left in its current meh state. It's such a clunky system with it only being a tether that's tied with all your aetherflow healing.

Physis

I gotta be honest, I've never actively thought about Physis buffing the GCD shields when I use it since I so rarely need to spend time shielding as a Sage anyway. That's just a nice little bonus when getting through the end of P4S2. A good work around would be making it so the Kardia buff is only spent by a certain number of attacks, but honestly I don't think losing an extra GCD in the rare instance you actually want to shield isn't worth stressing over. It's a tiny bit of antisynergy for a really niche case. Besides, now you have Holos to shield with as well, which is better than a physis buffed Eukrasian prognosis. I think losing 50 potency during downtime healing wouldn't make or break Sage's ability to get through mechanics. If the downtime is 10 seconds, that's still only an 150 potency of healing you're missing, less than a third of cure I, but I understand the concern.

If I'm understanding what you're saying about making it into an attack, it would just proc Kardia the one time? It might as well just be Pneuma then. I like the idea of it applying Kardia and then the healing being based on which attacks the Sage decides to use. You could potentially get more mileage out of it with your addersting spenders. My problem with making Soteria the "kardia for everyone" button is that there's already a superfluous amount of OGCD healing in Sage's kit, and outright buffing Soteria to be another AoE heal when you already have so much free heals flying around wouldn't make the "vampire healer" identity stand out. The other problem is that Physis is on a shorter cooldown than Soteria. It is the most used AoE heal on Sage because it doesn't cost Addersgall. Physis is the perfect button to put this kind of mechanic on to embrace that Kardia playstyle.

Emergency Kardia Button

The point here is to lean into that "vampire healing" archetype. Yes, just having the GCD heals proc Kardia would functionally work, but that goes against the job identity. Tying heals to your Addersting (which is much more available because of the new combo) means you get much more healing from dealing damage, and balancing your stacks with how much healing you might need as well as your new Kardia-applying physis and Soteria lends a great deal of depth to it. The point of the changes is to tie your personal damage kit to your basic healing playstyle, and to have the OPTION for it to work as an emergency button if you synergize it with your other cooldowns, but honestly a Zoe'd Pneuma will do you better in most of those circumstances anyway since it comes out faster. Simply applying Kardia to your GCD heals for a time doesn't provide this same synergy or job fantasy.

With that said I don't think emergency buttons like that should be a focus for a barrier healer fix as their whole kit is around avoiding said scenarios

Maybe I said something wrong here, but I don't want the Addersting heals to be an emergency button. I'm trying to lean into the "vampire healer" playstyle. They should be a large portion of your heals, that CAN become an emergency button with proper use of the new Physis with Soteria, so long as you've kept a stack or two of Addersting.

On an unrelated, I don't think I'd even call Sage a shield healer anyway. You rarely if ever should shield outside of putting Eukrasia Diagnosis on the tank before pulls and Eukrasia Prognosis in ultimate, and the only synergy shielding has with your kit is using Zoe/Physis to buff your next shield, which again is incredibly rare. Sage really is just a standard healer with shields tacked on to its design. If anything, my new kit encourages more shielding with the changes to Holos and Druochole.

As far button bloat, you can't expect to not add any buttons if you want to give them a DPS rotation. Your only other options be to make it a two part combo with the second attack's Eukrasia mode being tied to Addersting. I made it a three hit combo because...

-Duodosis, I like the idea of the combo but... that's all? You just changed 1 spam into 1-2 spam, where are the kit interactions? where are the build up or additional effects? Where are the branching paths? A standard combo works in other classes because as filler when its used its effects go further than just damage (building gauge, branching paths, giving buffs...) but this combo doesn't really do anything like that, its fake depth.

I mean we get rid of Tridosis and just stick to Duodisis and make it a 1-2 combo that builds Addersting, to use on the Eukrasia'd version. This would lower it to only 1 new button.