Fixing Every Healer Job

[Leonerdo]

White Mage Changes
Aero 3 is back.
A lesser version of Blood Lily is now unlocked at the same time as Lilies.
Glare is now a part of a 3-hit rotation. The Glare combo reduces the cooldown of their new damage GCD, Bloom, by 1 second per cast.
2 charges of Assize. Assize now restores 10% mana.
Gave lilies a spender for when HP is not needed.

New White Mage Abilities
Bud of the Blood Lily - Level 52 version of Blood Lily. Less potency. Replaced with Afflatus Misery at 74.
Shine - Combos off Glare. Deals 310 potency and reduces the cooldown of Bloom by 1 seconds. Combos into...
Smite - Combos off Shine. Deals 330 potency and reduces the cooldown of Bloom by 1 seconds.
Bloom - 30 second GCD AoE with a potency of 400 and empowers the next Blood Lily by 10%. Can not stack. Its cooldown is reduced by 1 seconds for each cast of Holy II and Shine/Smite.
Aero 3 - AoE DoT.
Refulgence - The upgrade to Aero 3. AoE Dia. Has a chance to proc Blinding Refulgence, which works like Thundercloud procs, dealing the full amount of the DoT and reapplying it. This works for Dia as well.
Afflatus Inspiratione - Spends 1 lily to grant a 300 potency shield to all party members.

I guess I'll just throw my feedback on the pile. In the quote, I've bolded the parts that I like. Criticisms first, followed by positive stuff:

Aero 3/Refulgence is okay, but it's not worth an extra button slot. It's just 1 button you press once after mobs are grouped up. People already use Dia on the first pack while running to the next one, and this would overwrite that for almost no gain. You'd just be replacing Dia spam with one Refulgence, and then you have nothing to cast while running. Besides, WHM already has plenty of AoE buttons (especially if Bloom is AoE).

Thundercloud only works on BLM because it's used for movement, filler during Ice phase, or DPS. Balancing those 3 applications makes it interesting. Thundercloud on Dia would change nothing: you would still try to reapply the DoT every 30 seconds.

Afflatus Inspiratione is debatable, but at the very least it needs to be weaker than that. At 300 potency, it's nearly the value of a Succor shield, almost for free (just 1 lily charge, and we have a plenty of lily charges nowadays). For Ultimate and early Savage prog, mitigation is very important, and this could provide an extra mitigation on every single big raidwide. I already think Collective Unconscious on AST is maybe too much mitigation for a pure healer, and this is better than that. Maybe it would be balanced at 200 potency, but it's still feels like an out-of-place ability to throw on WHM. It adds shielding output, but doesn't add interactivity in the kit. (Although it would make WHM/AST a more viable team, to match SCH/SGE. Not sure if that's good or bad.)

On to the positives. Misery is definitely crucial to end-game WHM gameplay, because it shifts a huge amount of power (and fun) into the lily system. As a side-effect, this also make WHM much more flexible because lilies can be used for movement. Making a version of that available at level 52 would help a lot. Being a little conservative though, I would say it's not needed until level 62+. WHM gets a lot in HW, and almost nothing in StB.

The GCD Combo into Bloom I think is pretty much what I would expect SQEX to add to healers. Because it adds a little depth/busywork for the veterans, but ultimately is not very impactful (i.e. casuals can ignore it and not lose much). Maybe that sounds like a complaint, but I think it's good because it gives veterans something extra to track, and you can get very precise about it, but it doesn't hurt much if you drift cooldowns or screw up the combo. (While using Shine/Smite, you want to pay extra attention to the Bloom cooldown, in case the reduction makes it come off cooldown early.) I'd just make Smite reduce the cooldown by 2 seconds to differentiate it from Shine.

The 10% blood lily buff isn't super necessary, but if it's a short buff (like 5 sec), it could be interesting trying to align it with Misery and burst windows. Mixed feelings on that though. It might be one-too-many things to optimize at once, and thus might be frustrating when things can't be aligned properly. I would want to test it before concluding anything.

Oh and I almost forgot. I've advocated for 2 charges on Assize in the past. It's an easy win-win-win. It can be used back-to-back for big burst, so it's fun. It would be available for healing more often (even when trying to use both charges in raid buff windows), so it improves the versatility of WHM. And it's easier to avoid drifting the cooldown, so it lowers the skill floor.

Overall good post, OP. Some of your ideas are crazy, but I like the initiative.

[Silver-Strider]

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

Other healers have more oGCDs to facilitate not needing Holy's stun. Power creep has left Holy as little more than a bandaid to compensate for the lack of oGCDs in the toolkit.

The "fair" damage is lower than both Art of War and Dyskrasia while Gravity is only 10 potency lower than Holy but has both a quicker cast time and is ranged.

[Sebazy]

I guess I'll just throw my feedback on the pile. In the quote, I've bolded the parts that I like. Criticisms first, followed by positive stuff:

Aero 3/Refulgence is okay, but it's not worth an extra button slot. It's just 1 button you press once after mobs are grouped up. People already use Dia on the first pack while running to the next one, and this would overwrite that for almost no gain. You'd just be replacing Dia spam with one Refulgence, and then you have nothing to cast while running. Besides, WHM already has plenty of AoE buttons (especially if Bloom is AoE).

I assume that SirShady's suggestion of Aero 3 would be as it was back in the day, aka it could stack with Dia. Timing it to land during trash pulls in dungeons was a pretty neat mini game in itself, especially if you didn't want to use swiftcast on it. I could be wrong OFC but that would certainly be my preference.

[Shurrikhan]

Well, with Dissipation no longer granting a 20% heal boost

Ngl, I do not like the idea of a pet-purging ability doing nothing more than giving you a free pet ability when it comes back, especially when overflow is so high (enough for at least 4 spenders per minute).

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

Again, even if you tie only Broils and DoTs applications to Fairy Gauge generation at half the current tick value, you'd generate 120 gauge per minute, enough to use Fey Blessing (which takes only 12.5 seconds' build-up) almost 5 times, while also further pushing Broil spam over heals (as Broil would now provide free healing that healing GCDs would not provide). You'd need to far more.

But the redundancy is also a significant issue. Do we really need both two Indoms (AF-Indom and FG-Indom)?

[Shurrikhan]

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

This would depend entirely on mobs not progressing towards auto-attacks or future special attacks while stunned. If player behavior is anything to go by, they likely progress towards both. The stun would then merely delay readied auto-attacks from being cast, much like downtime does for us.

I.e., if one is stunned for 2 seconds with only 1.5 seconds left until auto-attack, they've lost .5s of autos; however, if they're stunned for 2 seconds and still had 2+ seconds left until their next auto-attack, their damage won't have decreased at all.

The same interaction would occur with special attacks, most noticeably the instant casts among them.

tl;dr:
Holy's total stun duration would need to have no gaps for it to provide even 7 seconds of complete damage mitigation (technically, still short of that, as any time until next auto eclipsed by the stun would not be affected).

On average, Holy likely instead tends to net about 3 seconds of trimmed autos from mobs being unable to use capped/readied auto-attacks, and briefly delayed castless specials, across the spam. Its utility value is both generally greatly overestimated and appears to come at cost elsewhere in the toolkit (in terms of bankability and modularity of free heals).

[Silver-Strider]

Ngl, I do not like the idea of a pet-purging ability doing nothing more than giving you a free pet ability when it comes back, especially when overflow is so high (enough for at least 4 spenders per minute).

That's assuming Dissipation would continue to dispel your fairy or anything of what it currently does. If DoTs return, SCH won't need the roundabout DPS gain that Dissipation currently gives thru Energy Drain so that it could be changed to do something else.

Again, even if you tie only Broils and DoTs applications to Fairy Gauge generation at half the current tick value, you'd generate 120 gauge per minute, enough to use Fey Blessing (which takes only 12.5 seconds' build-up) almost 5 times, while also further pushing Broil spam over heals (as Broil would now provide free healing that healing GCDs would not provide). You'd need to far more.

But the redundancy is also a significant issue. Do we really need both two Indoms (AF-Indom and FG-Indom)?

Looking at the average SCH on the forbidden site, they use Fairy Abilities roughly 20 times within a 7-8 minute fight.
So approximately 2.5 abilities per minute, meaning at minimum, that's 62.5 gauge used per minute and towards 112.5 on the high end of the scale. The average used would be 87.5 gauge a minute. 120 gauge generation a minute vs 87.5 gauge used per minute. Now, this is also not factoring in that Blessing and Covenant would have their CD halved, allowing for more usage as well. You could see an increase in usage go up to about 26-30 uses in a 7-8 minute fight. You'd be at around an average of 95-110 vs 120 gauge generated, making it just barely able to outpace the speed of being spent. Ofc, this is assuming 100% uptime. Any DoT that falls off or any Broil substituted with an Addlo/Succor drops that 120 gauge generated and do you think that your average SCH can have 100% uptime? Does every single SCH keep their DoT rolling 100% of the time or does it fall off for 1-2 seconds periodically? Does your average SCH not use the occasional Addlo or Succor? What about Addlo+Deployment on a mechanic? You used Covenant for a reason, right? Hell, just looking at some DSR data, you see SCHs using Succor and Addlo well into the double digits so why do you cling to this notion as though generating X amount of gauge per minute is somehow problematic?

It's virtually a non-issue, even theoretically.

I agree with the redundancy part but that's more a problem with Healer Design being over saturated to the nines with Healing abilities. Do you need both Indom and Blessing? Not necessarily but despite that, both skills are used pretty often enough to justify their coexistence.

[WaxSw]

fey gauge and aetherflow

Its all personal opinion but about the gauge is mainly because it can give more depth to the fairy skills than only being limited by a cooldown. It could allow for a more interesting resource management, it would be build and spend yes but if properly managed it could lead to Sch having to think more deeply about the efficiency of the tools vs their effectiveness in the short and long term, allowing smart and efficient Sch to rely more on their pets than less experienced ones and as such giving a skill ceiling in the healing that is not simply "do not use X unless you dont have anything else"and because right now is used in a way that has very little impact on Sch gameplay when one could think that in a pet healer a pet related gauge would be something big. (I have an old example of how I'd envisioned that gauge in this forum that could give a better idea of what I talk about, keep in mind it was before EW tho)

About Aetherflow:

Because it does not fit the current game, the game is moving to a place where more free healing is happening than ever and Aetherflow in its current iteration only serves to punish Sch when used to fulfil its role. One could argue that it serves as a way to force Sch to really think about the way they approach their healing and while that is to some extent true the approach is very rarely something more deep than "not use it" instead of "use X instead of Y" is not that much of depth, if healing is a puzzle "do not use this piece that is core to the job" shoudn't be the correct solution that often, worst of all is that in relevant content the Sch is rarely the one paying for its own mistakes as is usually the cohealer who has to pick up the slack. One could also argue that is allows Sch for more dps depth but imo that should come from its own dps rotation and not from a tool that penalize it for healing, especially when once again, if the healing is not done properly more often than not the Sch is not the one paying the consequences

About the flexibility sorry but I disagree, Addersgall and Aetherflow are the exact same thing with the only difference being that one does not penalize the job that interacts with the system and as such all of the tools in it are used more frequently while the other penalize its use on any heal, look at the parses and see out of all the aetherflow how many are used on ED vs the rest of actions if they are used at all (Spoiler: Top Sch in P4s only use AE to heal once and left its cohealer deal almost twice as much healing as they did). The current Aetherflow design creates a dominant strategy within the mechanic of using it in ED in almost its entirely while Addersgall allow for its tools to have breathing room where they all can see use (Same argument with Lillies with the difference of not being so quite the exact same thing and its use being encouraged more as it makes the job not only more capable of healing but also allows for smart Whm to capitalize raid buffs).

[Shurrikhan]

So approximately 2.5 abilities per minute, meaning at minimum, that's 62.5 gauge used per minute and towards 112.5 on the high end of the scale.

Comparing 4 separate CDs to a shared spender system is comparing apples to oil tankers. You cannot draw blanket stats from the less constrained to apply acontextually to the more constrained system. The whole reason for the alternative system is to add complicators, no? Do not then leave them out.

The average used would be 87.5 gauge a minute.

And this is why they're not comparable without simulative context. Neither 80 or 90 gauge are spendable values threshold in your proposed system, only 75 or 100 (any sums of multiples of 25 and 50). If one generates less than is necessary to optimize a given CD strapped to the gauge, the CD is now effectively longer; meanwhile, if a CD is far longer than can be spent on competing

120 gauge generation a minute vs 87.5 gauge used per minute.

But your free play area, given the superiority of Seraph (worth more than triple any 25-gauge spender), and Dawn over Blessing, is actually only whatever remains. They are not separate anymore. You need to simulate that instead of just drawing blanket stats from purposely different systems.

Does every single SCH keep their DoT rolling 100% of the time...?

If you're giving gauge per tick, even at 5 gauge per Broil/DoT tick, you'd then have a max of 210 gauge generation per minute. A mere 2 DoT casts per minute would already net you 100 gauge. And, again, that's after having already halved the generation from 10 to 5.

Any DoT that falls off or any Broil substituted with an Addlo/Succor drops that 120 gauge generated and do you think that your average SCH can have 100% uptime?

Mate, you are the one who made Fey skills dependent on Broil spam. (Or DoT maintenance; it's hard to tell now because you're still using the 120/min value, down from 210, despite implying that DoT uptime would matter.) I'm under no obligation to evaluate whether the constraint you designed follows your intent. And as you've yet to really lay out any gameplay intent, I would not be able to do so anyways.

Hell, just looking at some DSR data, you see SCHs using Succor and Addlo well into the double digits so why do you cling to this notion as though generating X amount of gauge per minute is somehow problematic?

If your argument for constraining a kit is backhand excused by DSR healing alone, that is Yoshida-level BS.

You have yet to present why making Fey skills dependent on Broil spam (and/or DoT maintenance) is a good thing. You have yet to present why constraining the kit is a good thing. You have yet to present why tying restorative Fey magics to boiling/poisoning enemies even makes sense thematically. You have offered no affordances beyond a higher available frequency of Fey Blessing (albeit at cost -- except not really, because it's somehow fine if the gauge has overflow thereby overtunes the kit in full Broil-spam scenarios despite undertuning it in intensive healing scenarios), or I guess now Dawn, too (except, at competing cost).

That's a lot of not-great impact you're waving off on the mere basis that "We need a second gauge (for the sake a second gauge)!" (Or, that we need to revitalize the Fey Gauge, no matter the surrounding impact, rather than just addressing Aether Pact (and/or Fey Blessing, formerly its AoE variant.)

Pretend there's no gauge involved by which to get pissed at a UI element being used on relatively little. What gameplay impact do you want from this?
Every shared-resource and/or builder-spender system will have, and constrain gameplay towards, its particular incentives. So what are you hoping to accomplish from these beyond just throwing more stuff in to the "Other" basket so that Aetherpact feels less lonely / in need of correction?

Because right now you've just got at most a slightly greater frequency of lackluster Fey skills, at cost, that now have to be mindful of the time-until-refresh on Seraph -- all of which increases the value of Broil spam and, at best, overtunes the kit in high offensive uptime scenarios while likely making it clunkier for many, especially in more healing-intensive or when in less optimizing hands.

Do you need both Indom and Blessing? Not necessarily but despite that, both skills are used pretty often enough to justify their coexistence.

They're both used because they are superior and free, respectively.

Using Indom to use one fewer Succor has nearly three times the offensive value (through an extra Broil) of Energy Drain. If Soil and cohealer scheduled CDs have already been used, and one still needs an AoE heal, it will be taken over ED + Succor, every time. Fey Blessing, meanwhile, costs nothing anymore, rather than being the AoE Aetherpact option.


_________________________

Let me clear here: I do not think there is anything inherently wrong with constraining skills to a gauge. But the result of that change must then feel better than what we have now, and I'm not seeing that here.

I even rather like well-made gauges, due to the affordances and considerations (well, more like timing-interplay) they produce. The primary affordance, naturally, is the ability to exchange casts per minute of one skill into that of another, favoring whichever is least wasteful. It's worth noting, though, that the ability selection almost never takes more than two braincells (three if the gauge uses different ST->AoE breakpoints than the rest of the given job's kit); it instead simply produces a matter of margining (having X gauge by Y time), which can easily degrade to bar-watching if the rhythm of generation is not intuitive / able to be tracked by muscle memory.

Thematically, SCH is sort of an intersection between ability selection (AF spenders, with ED nerfed enough to be punished almost threefold for any use outside of overflow) and ability timing. But does making Fey skills compete for resource give us more, of interest, from ability selection than we lose in separable ability timing and general feeling of polish (such as per responsiveness, or in our current feeling of having our array of tools that do not blot each other out)? And is making the kit whose performance already varies most with healing requirements vary yet more with those healing requirements... a good idea? I could be convinced, but at present it looks like the far simpler solution is to drop the Stormblood gauge obsession, just put a stack count on the Aetherpact button itself, and call it a day, and/or maybe put Fey Blessing again share those stacks as an AoE alternative.

[Silver-Strider]

Snip.

I mentioned Bad RNG in my initial statement. Why would I mention that if not to insinuate that DoTs would not guarantee Gauge generation? I originally thought about it working that way but due to the number of variables I had to also consider (uptime, GCD healing usage, new players, etc) I figured that I needed to add a contingency or 2 in order to make the system work effectively, hence why Aetherflow and Dissipation were mentioned as well to add onto the System. I only stated 120 because that was your initial argument based on DoTs and Broil alone so I based my argument on yours. DoT uptime is still important though because, despite not being guaranteed, it still helps to build your gauge so ofc I'm going to mention it.

I'm not drawing blanket stats out of thin air here. I'm going based on what you can theoretically achieve thru actually mathing out everything.

In the 1st minute of P4S, you end up using Covenant, Blessing, Dawn and Seraph for a total of 125 Gauge usage. You cast Broil approximately 9 times in that minute for a gauge restore of 45 for a total of 20 gauge, with Covenant and Blessing being off CD already more than likely, and with a 15s gap to build up the gauge for Inverse Chlamys, you should be able to use both for it. Setting the Scene gives you plenty of time to build up the gauge to roughly 75 before any of the mechanics come out and you can utilize Blessing to help during them, while having enough gauge for Seraph again for the Bloodrakes after the 2nd Tank Buster. I could go on but my point is that I already mapped out fairy usage based off of when and where you would need it and when CDs permit, while using only Broil as a means of building gauge (because I can't account for RNG DoT procs). It could work, IF 100% uptime is achieved, which is not something I would force onto any player, especially during prog. DoTs, Aetherflow and Dissipation would all allow a level of leeway with the system so that a SCH wouldn't be screwed with it. So, in theory, you can absolutely compress all of the Fairy abilities into my proposed Gauge system rework.

The reason why I primarily built the system on DPS is because I sternly believe that Healer's toolkits should revolve around a gameplay loop of DPS and Healing feeding into one another. Your DPS skills help you to heal, hence Broil building Fairy Gauge, and your heals benefit your DPS in some way, such as Addlo reflecting damage so as to compensate for not using Broil. I don't really see it as constraining, at least not any more than SCH currently is with its conflicting toolkit.

They're both used because they are superior and free, respectively.

This is one of my problems with the current healer design. Why use GCD heals at all when oGCDs are so abundant, free and powerful? Shouldn't there be some level of trade off between them to make the choices not so black and white? In your example, Indom is not only more powerful than Succor in terms of healing but also in the fact that it allows you to use Broil to gain DPS over using Succor+Energy Drain and that it doesn't cost 1k MP. What is the benefit of Succor then? A last ditch effort for when crap hits the fan? Why are we content with that? Why is every single suggestion on how to "Fix" healers only geared towards part of the toolkit and not the whole job?

I admit, I have not shared my entire rework for SCH and without that context, some of my suggestions come off as impractical or, to use your own words, constraining but to receive this level of push back for trying to salvage a horribly underutilized system seems excessive.

[Nizzi]

snip

In regards to the fey gauge, I don't disagree that it could allow for more interesting resource management, I just do not believe SE is capable of making anything literally anything interesting about resource management on healers; especially going into the second point about how more free healing is happening than ever.

I do want to say that I don't necessarily disagree that ED has a perception or feeling of being punishing, and that Aetherflow is very much a relic of an older game design for healers that doesn't exist anymore. In that same token though, I think the current game design for healers really sucks and because of that it shouldn't be removed. There's absolutely nothing interesting about the multitudes of free healing that is now present in the game to me; and while I understand some disagree, it's just so mindnumbingly dull that I can't bear it. It's one of the reasons I really didn't like AST in ShB, and it's why SCH is the only healer I find fun anymore.

Silver-Stride touches on something I really agree with and want to bring up here for the sake of discussion:

Why use GCD heals at all when oGCDs are so abundant, free and powerful? Shouldn't there be some level of trade off between them to make the choices not so black and white? In your example, Indom is not only more powerful than Succor in terms of healing but also in the fact that it allows you to use Broil to gain DPS over using Succor+Energy Drain and that it doesn't cost 1k MP. What is the benefit of Succor then? A last ditch effort for when crap hits the fan? Why are we content with that? Why is every single suggestion on how to "Fix" healers only geared towards part of the toolkit and not the whole job?

This is what I find so boring about non SCH healers. Imagine a Energy Drain-less SCH. Why would you ever use Fey Blessing over Indom unless Indom just happens to be on CD? Currently, you always use it first because Indom has a DPS cost to it outside of Recitation. But without ED? It's just button bloat with lower potency on a longer CD. You can argue that it's pretty much just button bloat now (and I wouldn't disagree, really) but all of the free healing has just become "I hit [insert oGCD here] to heal and I healed!" Would an Energy Drain-less Scholar suddenly be healing more? Yeah, maybe, but is the content going to be tuned to actually require it? No, not at all, so we warp back to the age old thing that everyone claims to hate but always end up wanting - homogenizing something in order to make it perform as every other job does. (Of course, not implying that you specifically want this, but the DPS trade off is something unique no other healer has.) Personally, if they decide ED has to go, they need to get rid of oGCD bloat across all healers as well to necessitate us using our GCD heals more while also increasing our DPS rotation and depth. Nothing short of this will make that trade off worth it.

One could also argue that is allows Sch for more dps depth but imo that should come from its own dps rotation and not from a tool that penalize it for healing, especially when once again, if the healing is not done properly more often than not the Sch is not the one paying the consequences

This is pretty much the reasoning that led to SCH's DPS kit being gutted in the first place, and I don't think the existence of bad players or greedy players should be even more of a reason to homogenize and neuter whats left of distinct differences between jobs that aren't base level paint jobs at this point. Don't get me wrong though; I don't really disagree on that either - but I think we both know that SE will absolutely not replace Energy Drain with anything that is more interesting; considering they seem to have a fear of even giving Ruin II or Energy Drain new animations, I sincerely believe they would make Energy Drain a 2 charge 30s oGCD with a potency of 150, separate it from Aetherflow and call it a day. That sounds exactly like the level of work they'd be willing to do if they didn't decide to just outright remove it and replace it with a fat whopping nothing like in the past.

Energy Drain is a non significant DPS gain to focus on purely, and I think Scholars who focus on ED, something that amounts to an 5% DPS gain if totally optimal in coordinated environments above healing are just bad players; I don't think this is a reason to remove it. It wasn't a reason to remove Miasma, Shadow Flare, Bane and Miasma II either even though there were Scholars that focused on that above healing as well.

Sorry if this comes off as just total Scholar apologism, I just really love the job. I don't want to see one of the things I find fun about it reworked with current job design in mind, because that spells nothing but death for things anyone likes.