Fixing Every Healer Job

[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.


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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.