Fixing Every Healer Job

[Shurrikhan]

So make the Accordant changes that would allow the system to function. If they can change how the Lily System used to function from SB to ShB, there isn't really a reason they can't do similar to the Fairy Gauge.

Lily didn't merely make "accordant changes" to the system's context and spenders, though. In fact, both were untouched. It outright changed the Lily System itself to something that had only the name in common.

Have it start at 100 Gauge.
Whispering Dawn, Fey Blessing and Fey Covenant cost 25 gauge, while Seraph and Aetherpact cost 50
Have your DoTs build up the gauge in a similar fashion to BRD's Soul Gauge but to help mitigate bad RNG, continue to allow Aetherflow abilities to build up gauge. Throw Broil in for good measure.

Okay, so now your 320 AoE heal shares resource costs, at equal expense, with your 480 AoE heal (over 21s) and your +10% healing for 20 seconds. Given that you and your cohealer would need to then do 3200-4800 AoE healing over that time to make up for the lost Blessing or Dawn... are you then ever going to use Covenant?

And, is it worth buffing Covenant to the point of being competitive with those other options? Is a heal being instant worth losing a third of its potency? Will there actually remain use cases for the alternate spenders, or have you turned them into non-options?

These aren't rhetorical questions, but they would need to be answered before just making 4 abilities newly fight each other for usage would at all likely be a good idea.

Theoretically, that would work but SE would never allow it because they can't be bothered to put more than 2 brain cells towards healer design.

Well, that's what we have people who actually play the game for -- the 0.1% chance that if they hand a completed enough vision to the devs on a silver platter, the works of more than just 2 brain cells might nonetheless slip through into the game.

[Silver-Strider]

Okay, so now your 320 AoE heal shares resource costs, at equal expense, with your 480 AoE heal (over 21s) and your +10% healing for 20 seconds. Given that you and your cohealer would need to then do 3200-4800 AoE healing over that time to make up for the lost Blessing or Dawn... are you then ever going to use Covenant?

And, is it worth buffing Covenant to the point of being competitive with those other options? Is a heal being instant worth losing a third of its potency? Will there actually remain use cases for the alternate spenders, or have you turned them into non-options?

These aren't rhetorical questions, but they would need to be answered before just making 4 abilities newly fight each other for usage would at all likely be a good idea.

That depends on what else is adjusted really.
What if SCH's shields were adjusted to make them advantageous enough to warrant using Covenant over Dawn or Blessing? Say that Addlo now reflects back 140 potency worth of damage on hit, as an example. Most shields would be gone on 1-2 hits from a boss. Between the mitigation and buff to the shield granted by Covenant, if that was able to make it 2-3 hits instead, would that not be worth it? You get a small damage increase over Broil and both Covenant and Addlo becomes actually something to consider using, even more so if it crits. Obviously, you can't Addlo spam everyone in AoE situations so Blessing and Dawn still have their purpose, with Covenant being more as a way to mitigation and potentially gain DPS thru Addlo. Then, I already provided Dissipation to help negate the cost of a Fairy Ability so that there would be less conflict of usage as well. Finally, the abilities still have CDs so isn't not as though the abilities will even conflict with each other any more than they currently do, especially if we add DoTs and Broil as means of accumulating Fairy Gauge that resource management would be almost a non-issue.

It's a bit rough around the edges but still possible.

[Shurrikhan]

That depends on what else is adjusted really.
What if SCH's shields were adjusted to make them advantageous enough to warrant using Covenant over Dawn or Blessing? Say that Addlo now reflects back 140 potency worth of damage on hit, as an example. Most shields would be gone on 1-2 hits from a boss. Between the mitigation and buff to the shield granted by Covenant, if that was able to make it 2-3 hits instead, would that not be worth it?

I like your thinking there, but unless an affected shield would otherwise have just barely broken on the second hit, nothing in the order of 10% bonus healing raidwide (Covenant), or even a Divine Seal (+30% Spell healing) for oneself is going to make a 50-200% increase in hits taken before said shield breaks.

More simply, though, I think you'd simply have to rework Covenant. As you'd likely want to do with Aetherpact anyways (e.g., to cost 10 gauge per 3s tick of healing thus provided). I'm also unsure if I like Seraph being on there at all, considering it grants more than 75 gauge worth of resource (the benefits, essentially, of all the other spender options) and thus becomes a non-option, a mere CD that at best has some (arguably wonky) margin play by which one can't use other spenders when coming up on Seraph's CD because the latter so outweighs the others' efficiency.

Finally, the abilities still have CDs so isn't not as though the abilities will even conflict with each other any more than they currently do.

That seems a cop-out, unless said CDs are at least less than they are now.

Imagine, for instance, if Lustrate, Sacred Soil, Indom, Excog, and Energy Drain all had CDs of a minute or more. Due to attaching Broil to its generators (I'd have to hope at a mere 5 per, at least, if you don't want it capping in under 20 seconds), your earlier spitball generation would cap the Faerie gauge roughly per 30 seconds, while likewise offering 3 actions worth (25, 25, and either 50) of spenders from cap. You'd be unable to spend the resource as quickly as you build it if you left no (nearly) CD-less options.

Or, more generally put... If the SCH can't leverage the situational advantages of one ability over its alternatives (or avoid being budgeted less advantageous abilities) beyond what it could before then why have the shared resource at all? If the system doesn't cause new considerations (i.e., conflicts and affordances), leaving us just doing as we did before, then it will be mere bloat.

[SenzorialBoundries]

The more i read those threads the more i feel like healers nowadays are just dps Players in disguise.
The real problem with healers is not the healers themselves its how the enounters are designed. Remove heavily scripted dmg, add more healing checks, make bosses auto attack the tank for half of their hp like how Bahamut used to do back in the day. Remember the coils how you had to stance dance between cleric to apply dots and normal stance to actually heal bcs bosses hit like a truck ? yeah that was engaging and skillfull. This becomes very apparent for me when i play a dps or tank class and most of the healers i get in PF cant even keep up with a mild heal check like the bleed from endsinger ex.

[Hellebore_Ghrian]

The real problem with healers is not the healers themselves its how the enounters are designed. Remove heavily scripted dmg, add more healing checks, make bosses auto attack the tank for half of their hp like how Bahamut used to do back in the day. Remember the coils how you had to stance dance between cleric to apply dots and normal stance to actually heal bcs bosses hit like a truck ? yeah that was engaging and skillfull. This becomes very apparent for me when i play a dps or tank class and most of the healers i get in PF cant even keep up with a mild heal check like the bleed from endsinger ex.

I think most of us are more than agree with your point... but SE have already clearly state that they do not plan to increase healing requirement because they want to keep healing easy, relatively failsafe and accessible (and for me it only goes lower and lower...).

So since they won't change encounter design and our healing side won't improved, what remains is asking/coping to have a better dps side to fill the void.

[Sebazy]

The more i read those threads the more i feel like healers nowadays are just dps Players in disguise.
The real problem with healers is not the healers themselves its how the enounters are designed. Remove heavily scripted dmg, add more healing checks, make bosses auto attack the tank for half of their hp like how Bahamut used to do back in the day. Remember the coils how you had to stance dance between cleric to apply dots and normal stance to actually heal bcs bosses hit like a truck ? yeah that was engaging and skillfull. This becomes very apparent for me when i play a dps or tank class and most of the healers i get in PF cant even keep up with a mild heal check like the bleed from endsinger ex.

Sadly that’s exactly what the game expects of us. You can see it as far back as Gordias and Midas with some more modern fights outright requiring significant amounts of healer DPS to clear enrage (E8S was probably the worst offender here).

This mentality filters down into comparatively irrelevant content in the same way that forced metas have in the past.

SE made this situation, not the player base.

[Silver-Strider]

Snip

Well, with Dissipation no longer granting a 20% heal boost, we could probably give that to Covenant to compensate and maybe increase the mitigation from 5% to 10%. I feel that lowering the CD of Covenant 60s would also be beneficial. Still might not be enough but since most "Heal" checks in the game nowadays are mitigation checks, it would still be a buff in that department to consider.

For Seraph to work on the Gauge, her abilities would probably need to be free to cast to justify it being on the gauge at all. Having her off the gauge, depending on if Consolation cost gauge or not, would still result in a 50 gauge cost for using Angel Whisper and Seraph Illumination so I don't really seem much of a difference whether she's on or off the gauge. Personally, I think Blessing should have turned to Consolation while Seraph is out but that would mean they'd cost gauge as well so I figured having her on the Gauge and just making her skills free to cast would be a good compromise but that's just me.

I imagine Fey Blessing is weak enough to where it could be lowered to a 30s CD without much issue; It's just a weaker Indom so I don't really understand why SE put it on a 60s CD to begin with, which is even more perplexing considering it started off costing gauge as well. Being on a 30s CD would allow it to be used more than Dawn or Covenant at least so you could somewhat stem the tide of overflow but Gauge generation was something that I was unsure of on the direction of which to go with. Originally, I was more for just having Aetherflow abilities no longer build up Gauge and just having DoTs and Broil build it up since that would generate quickly enough on its own that you'd always have enough gauge to continue using your fairy abilities without much issue. However, since I knew that newer players would be somewhat apprehensive to do much DPS when starting off, it would be harder for them to heal with SCH that I sort of haphazardly kept the Aetherflow aspect of it to at least help them out a bit, despite knowing it might be a bit more than could realistically be spent in that case. It was just a matter of, do I want to give an olive branch to new players, even if it came at some level of detriment to the design. Ultimately, I chose the olive branch.

[Bonkleberry]

Unpopulr opinion, I know, but I do not think healers really need fixing.

Having played all healers at max level, the only real problems I ever saw was that SGE sucks if your Tanks are terrible or super squishy (Kardion stops contributing to healing when you cannot DPS) and healing inbetween Holy spam for WHM feels clunky (give Holy the same cast time as Glare or make it instant cast).

[Silverbane]

Unpopulr opinion, I know, but I do not think healers really need fixing.

Agreed.

Having played all healers at max level, the only real problems I ever saw was that SGE sucks if your Tanks are terrible or super squishy (Kardion stops contributing to healing when you cannot DPS) and healing inbetween Holy spam for WHM feels clunky (give Holy the same cast time as Glare or make it instant cast).

Plus Holy's damage coming at the end of the channel, rather than immediately as is the case for Dyskrasia and Art of War, can be really annoying. I've been leveling WHMs to get my 5th and 6th characters able to enter the housing lotteries, and I've lost track of how many times a tank has dragged the mobs out of Holy's AoE before the channel finished.

Holy's stun is nice, while it works, but it doesn't make up for being able to move freely and weave heals in between casts, like you can do with Dyskrasia and Art of War. You can't run with the mobs as the tank kites them while spamming Holy.

[fulminating]

Unpopulr opinion, I know, but I do not think healers really need fixing.

Having played all healers at max level, the only real problems I ever saw was that SGE sucks if your Tanks are terrible or super squishy (Kardion stops contributing to healing when you cannot DPS) and healing inbetween Holy spam for WHM feels clunky (give Holy the same cast time as Glare or make it instant cast).

Playing something at max level isn't necessarily the same as playing it at a high level. Could you elaborate a bit on what kind of content you heal? I have played all the healers in expert dungeons, but wouldn't really feel comfortable offering any feedback on AST for example.

Plus Holy's damage coming at the end of the channel, rather than immediately as is the case for Dyskrasia and Art of War, can be really annoying. I've been leveling WHMs to get my 5th and 6th characters able to enter the housing lotteries, and I've lost track of how many times a tank has dragged the mobs out of Holy's AoE before the channel finished.

Holy's stun is nice, while it works, but it doesn't make up for being able to move freely and weave heals in between casts, like you can do with Dyskrasia and Art of War. You can't run with the mobs as the tank kites them while spamming Holy.

Having what is essentially a hallowed ground every mob pack on top of fair damage is a more than reasonable deal.