Fixing Every Healer Job

[SirShady]

Words and such.

You're doing God's work there. Putrefy is now Fey Tality. Yeah, the three minute timer on Dissipation does leave it in a bit of a weird spot. Honestly, I was thinking of reducing the cooldown to two minutes and having it only restore on aetherflow but... Eh. Honestly we just need to move away from the strict 2 minute burst situation. I suppose the vulnerabilities would stack, maybe with diminishing returns?

Honestly the Faerie Gauge is so poorly designed in combination with Fey Union. You really can't do anything with it in its current iteration without causing some kind of mess. Fey Union probably should just be a cooldown like Sage's Soteria. The ability there was just something to incentivize folks to keep a little extra gauge every 30 seconds to buff everyone.

I think changing Lustrate to a percentage heal could cause friction with healing jobs that aren't tanks. I understand the idea, but I think something like that would belong better on a different ability. Scholar kind of needs a bread and butter OGCD easy spammable heal. I think it would be fine if it worked like Essential Dignity though, healing based on missing health.

Honestly, with how more weaving is being implemented into White Mage, the short cast time buffer makes the class play much smoother, especially those with higher ping. So as much as I like the idea of the healers having a black mage turret equivalent, I don't think a lot of people would like it, and I think it would remove some synergy from their kit. If another healer is introduced that leans away from weaving, I could definitely see it then, provided it has a good amount of alternative movement options like Black Mage does.

[Garten]

I really love to read about job theoricrafting.. i know ofc we dont have the "full picture" of things, but It seems that often ppls have more immagination then devs :/

[SirShady]

I really love to read about job theoricrafting.. i know ofc we dont have the "full picture" of things, but It seems that often ppls have more immagination then devs :/

Thank you for reading! As a prospective game dev myself, it's one of my favorite things to do. Yeah the current gameplay devs desperately need more creativity. I appreciate wanting to make every job work for your flashy scripted encounters, but that's no excuse for an entire role be this boring and same-y.

[WaxSw]

I think the main problem here honestly is mostly the fact that Scholar already has a plethora of OGCD healing, and the faerie gauge being tied to Fey Union really limits its use. I think if we swapped Fey Union (Fey Union costs 1 aetherflow to tether for 9 seconds to an ally?) with Energy Drain and used the Faeria Gauge strictly a DPS spender that would eliminate the problem, but it might be a bit tricky. Not sure how other Scholar players would feel about that.

It would make them heal more yes however some would complain about how in encourages overhealing and kinda goes against the fairy identity as its not something that is there to damage

Physis

That would be better but I still think physis would suffer more than gain anything from that change as it limits the applications of its heal buff (no more buffing GCD shields or you lose kardia procs) and in downtime it would still feel bad to use as well as making it a more impractical tool than current version in the case you have high healing scenarios where you gotta use multiple GCD heals. Personally I feel that if you really want to make physis something that procs kardia making it an attack like pneuma (with point blank aoe so its used in downtime) would work (and open up synergy with Zoe) and as said Soteria could be the "kardia for everyone" button

Toxicon and Dps

If you want an emergency kardia button I'd suggest something that makes the GCD heals proc it for a short while, GCD heals are mainly for emergencies so it would fit well and make the kardia mechanic not useless in those scenarios. 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

I like the new combo idea but I feel adding 2 more buttons like that would make Sage get too close to button bloat. I think in this department you're forgetting that Sage's identity is also being able to change the buttons with actions like eukrasia (even if this identity is very undeveloped) so maybe that button bloat problem could be solved if you lean on eukrasia versions of existing buttons or new buttons.

[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.

[Semirhage]

going on a bit of a tangent but i feel like 1 button spam could work if the dps kit revolved around it via procs (like arr blm and brd), cooldown reductions and modal buttons

it would still need an extra button or two but it Could be fine if 1-spam actually had interesting effects, which i think is possible.

Astro had 111111111 back in Stormblood. They also had a real active secondary system to manage on top of it, and I remember Astros still said they wouldn't wish their 1 button spam on anyone.

Why WHM is the prime candidate for spamming 1 button over and over again, when they've never had an active system to manage a distraction from said 1 button spam, is beyond me.

Shadowbringers and Endwalker just transferred the worst aspects of Stormblood AST onto WHM, tricked the community into thinking it "belongs" on WHM, and slapped on an overheal-encouraging passive job gauge for good measure. I'm in the minority here- I don't think WHM is "just a few tweaks away" from good design. I think its DPS kit is horrendously designed. I think its healing kit is barely interactive on an incredibly superficial level. The job gauge is both passive and doesn't encourage playing intelligently. Just blindly barreling forward and getting rewarded whether your resource usage was smart or not.

In short, I hate this whole milieu of "WHM is supposed to be stupid and horribly designed, that's *~variety~*! Getting dumber and less interactive downtime was a good direction for WHM! Finally, it sees the beginnings of good design!" when what actually happened was WHM had fewer brain cells to scramble with the great lobotomization of Shadowbringers.

It blows my mind how the healer forums wail endlessly about the jobs being A) boring and horribly designed, and B) homogenized (which implies that they're ALL boring and horribly designed), and then turn around and go "oh but this thing I just finished lambasting is just wonderful on WHM! Make them play like this pig slop I was bitching about two sentences ago. Being SImPuL is GoOD (for WHM!)"

[Silver-Strider]

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.

Why not have the Fairy Gauge work sort of like BRD's Soul Gauge then?
Have Bio and Miasma have a chance of building up the gauge by 5 points per tic, with Broil also granting 5 gauge and having each Fairy ability cost 25/50 gauge to use with the SCH starting off with a full gauge.
Dissipation would need to be reworked for it to function but it could work.

[Silver-Strider]

Astro had 111111111 back in Stormblood. They also had a real active secondary system to manage on top of it, and I remember Astros still said they wouldn't wish their 1 button spam on anyone.

Why WHM is the prime candidate for spamming 1 button over and over again, when they've never had an active system to manage a distraction from said 1 button spam, is beyond me.

Shadowbringers and Endwalker just transferred the worst aspects of Stormblood AST onto WHM, tricked the community into thinking it "belongs" on WHM, and slapped on an overheal-encouraging passive job gauge for good measure. I'm in the minority here- I don't think WHM is "just a few tweaks away" from good design. I think its DPS kit is horrendously designed. I think its healing kit is barely interactive on an incredibly superficial level. The job gauge is both passive and doesn't encourage playing intelligently. Just blindly barreling forward and getting rewarded whether your resource usage was smart or not.

In short, I hate this whole milieu of "WHM is supposed to be stupid and horribly designed, that's *~variety~*! Getting dumber and less interactive downtime was a good direction for WHM! Finally, it sees the beginnings of good design!" when what actually happened was WHM had fewer brain cells to scramble with the great lobotomization of Shadowbringers.

It blows my mind how the healer forums wail endlessly about the jobs being A) boring and horribly designed, and B) homogenized (which implies that they're ALL boring and horribly designed), and then turn around and go "oh but this thing I just finished lambasting is just wonderful on WHM! Make them play like this pig slop I was bitching about two sentences ago. Being SImPuL is GoOD (for WHM!)"

I wholeheartedly agree with you. There definitely needs to be more to WHM than 1-1-1 spam because it doesn't have anything else to micromanage.
1-1-1 worked for AST because they had to micromanage their Card System but WHM doesn't have such a distraction to keep them engaged with. Keeping it that way just for the sake of keeping it simple just leaves WHM as a job with a Skill Floor and Ceiling practically touching and no job should have that. You can't say a system is bad and then keep that system anyways; it defeats your whole argument if you advocate to keep it.

I can compromise on keeping WHM simple but not 1-1-1 levels of simple.

[QooEr]

Astro had 111111111 back in Stormblood. They also had a real active secondary system to manage on top of it, and I remember Astros still said they wouldn't wish their 1 button spam on anyone."

yeah, im not wishing whm gets that sleep inducing gameplay. if i had it my way whm would have a lot more going to it.
im just saying that a spammy rotation, on any job, can work, taking bard and old blm as an example. if someone wants to design a spammy whm, i think they could make it work as long as theres enough variation/interactions/buildup to the spam

[Marxam]

its only a matter of time before they do with the healers what they did with the tanks. Homogenize the their role's tool kit (i.e. tank cds) and focus on a dps rotation. Though the tanks fared better than healers since their rotation was already varied from the start. Healers have always been a one button gcd and every 30 sec put up a dot job. Not to mention some healers will fare better than others.

SCH can go back to maisama/bio shenanigans and maybe faire manipulation? Constant uptime dot management. Maybe introduce faries that pulse aoe for strategic placement?

AST can go back to drawing cards and setting up hands for big bursts and buff duration manipulation. Drawing, shuffling and mulligan cards to set up hand loops. Maybe introduce setting cards on the field, face up or down, for aoe buffs/debuffs and cds that increase or decrease potency based on length of duration, similar to Earthly Star?

SGE can possibly reduce the healing tools it has in favor of emphasizing healing via Kardia, in addition to more attack gcds. Maybe introduce a healer combo rotation and a powerful cd that spread Kardia to all party members for a short period of time so your dmg can heal everyone while dpsing?

WHM is admittedly the hardest to come up with something but honestly there's no reason for at least one job in each role to be simple and exemplify what the role is, i.e. healing. WHM in EW is plain as jane but the healing it does is excellent and when it does dmg it does it big. So WHM probably doesn't need to change outside of QoL's. Maybe reintroduce cleric stance?

One thing I would like to see is all healing gcds in lower levels be changed to charges instead of using MP and being instant cast. Using WHM for example; if you had Cure 1 at six charges, Cure 2, at six charges and Cure 3 at three charges you will be more inclined to use Cure 1 for the freecure proc after you have used up all your Cure 2 charges and more strategic with your Cure 3. Maybe even have the aoe heals like Medica and Medica 2 at three charges to encourage Cure 3 use in very heavy healing scenarios. Ultimately, healing in this game has shifted from constant to bursts so all healing only needs to happen during those bursts and most of the time you are just doing dmg.

WHM already has this via the lilies. You have a gcd single heal and aoe, instant cast, limited resource and it works well. So why no apply it to the rest to increase their mobility?