The Pure/Barrier Split and my inane ramblings about it

[ForsakenRoe]

White Mage - Nature's Warden, Nature's Wrath

White magic in older FF games has been very mixed and matched, depending on the game. It's always had restorative magic like Cure, it's sometimes had 'nul-element' spells like in 10, it's had Holy be named as 'the ultimate white magic' in 5. What comes to mind when I think of White magic, however, is burst. No, not Burst the high level thunder spell, burst as in 'lots of number in small timeframe'. Burst healing, Burst damage, throwing Curaga out and massively healing the whole team always felt good in older games, so we can keep leaning into that, as WHM definitely can pump heals when it needs to.

Unfortunately, SE has definitely painted a lot of floor on WHM's design so far and we're pretty tucked into the corner on this one. It really feels like they wanted to have WHM be the 'starter healer', the 'simple healer' but that has left it with very little room to actually grow, forever held back by it's training wheels. Even so, with a bit of lore-abiding (probably) design and looking at it's past as a Conjurer, my brain spat out this:

WARNING: I AM NOT A THEORYCRAFTER I AM GOING FOR FEEL AND AESTHETIC HERE NOT EXACT POTENCY VALUES, IF POTENCIES SEEM WONKY THEY PROBABLY ARE, BUT CAN BE CHANGED EASILY

Plenary Indulgence moved to level 74
Afflatus Rapture moved to level 70 (now available in UCOB!)

New skill: Stoneskin (learned at 52 alongside lily gauge), GCD that puts a shield on the target equal to 300p heal, costs 1 lily
New skill: Afflatus Tragedy (learned at 62 just because there's a gap there), basically a downgrade from Misery, does 800p damage (4 stone3's is 880 so its a small loss still), this is just to help new players get into the idea of 'use lilies, get big hit that compensates the lost dps', upgrades to Misery at 76
New skill: Afflatus Bastion (upgrade from Stoneskin at 70), increases the shield from 300 to 400p
New skill: Afflatus Sanctuary (Learned at level 70 alongside Afflatus Rapture), GCD that shields all nearby party members equal to 200p healing, costs 1 lily

By keeping the potencies on the shields low, it lets the 'shield healers' be more specialised at shielding, but still giving WHM options to shield if it absolutely has to

Returning skill: Divine Seal (learned at 40), 2min CD that buffs healing actions by 20%, so 'Temperance without the damage mitigation', becomes Temperance at 80
Returning skill: Protect (learned at 10 or something), 60s CD that gives 5% damage mitigation for 10sec, upgrades to Plenary at 74. Plenary would retain the 5% damage reduction, in addition to it's current effect.

Returned from the dead skill: Fluid Aura (now renamed Water to fit better), now an instant cast GCD with a separate 15 second recast (affected by spellspeed), scaling damage like Stone, becomes Banish at Glare/Dia levels, does 40p more damage than Stone/Glare equivalent at any given level (say Glare3 is 310, maybe this could be 350?)

Aero/Dia changed to be 12 seconds duration, potency adjusted to balance, to mix up how often we're using Glare vs Dia (and to give the rotation a more 'bursty' feel) edit: 150 + 70per tick would total 430, while still keeping the base damage of the cast low to prevent spamming early application?

A new HUD element, the 'Nature Gauge' (name is WIP), a simple 0-100 gauge that fills by doing certain actions. Stone/Glare gives 1 point. Aero/Dia gives 1 point on cast, and 1 per tick (5 total over full duration). Water would give 5 due to being used less often than Stone. edit: Forgot dungeons exist, perhaps something for Holy like 'Each enemy hit by Holy grants 2 gauge' so bigger pulls = more gauge per Holy bomb thrown, the 2 instead of 1 would be to compensate for the fact we're probably not multi-DOTting in a pull of 8+ mobs. As a side note, Dia's ticks giving gauge would only count for the first enemy, so having multiple mobs DOT'd would not increase the speed you gain gauge. This is important to note for later

Upon reaching 50 gauge, you can use a new skill: Blessing of the Elementals (also WIP). This would be a new GCD AOE heal that heals for 500p, restoring 500MP to the WHM, and granting them 3 buffs. These buffs can stack, so if you need to use the skill twice back to back for some insane burst AOE healing, you won't be kicking yourself for losing stacks. The buffs would also have no duration, so they'll last as long as needed during downtime, and be consumed the next time you're able to hit the boss. These three buffs would be named after the three elements the WHM controls, maybe 'Rage of the River, Ire of the Earth and Wrath of the Winds' or something like that. The three buffs would essentially be consolation prizes so that casting the GCD heal isnt a DPS loss. The 'water one' would turn the next Water/Banish into Flood (yes Banish would go back to being an elemental spell for a second, because our natural roots shouldn't be completely forgotten in favor of pretty lights), 'earth buff' would turn the next Stone/Glare into Quake, and 'wind buff' would turn the next Aero/Dia into Tornado. These skills would replace your Glare, Dia and Banish keybinds for the next cast, similar to how Inner Chaos replaces Fell Cleave on your bars when you have the Nascent Chaos buff. No button bloat worries.

Since Glare3 is currently 310 potency, losing one cast of it to cast 'BOTE' is the potency I aim to offset, so my thinking is simply this: Quake is a 100p boost over the current level of Stone/Glare you have, Flood is a 100p boost over the current level of Water/Banish you have, Tornado is a little different, and is 20p per tick of the DOT stronger than your current Aero/Dia, with it's base cast being 30p stronger. The 4 dot ticks total 80, the cast is 30 to make 110, add that to Quake and Flood being 100 each, there's your 310 fully refunded. Additionally, these skills would generate Nature Gauge at the same rate as their regular counterparts, so Quake is worth 1, Tornado is worth 1 plus 1 per tick, and Flood is worth 5. As noted above, here is 'later', and Tornado's AOE-spread DOT would not give multiple ticks of gauge, only 1 per server tick regardless of mobs hit

The power of the healing of BOTE is intended to be a WHM themed answer to the, lets be honest, insane power of Earthly Star for AST. WHM has nothing that can really compete as it stands, so I came up with this as a way to reward WHMs who diligently protect nature with the power of violence. In my mind, a fully optimised run would get to the point where the WHM is able to deal with all the required healing using only their OGCDs, Lily heals (Rapture) and this new BOTE. Some things would be on the GCD yes, but the point of using OGCDs isn't because GCD bad, it's because 'GCD that loses damage bad' so DPS neutral skills are A-OK.

edit: More dungeon stuff: Quake, Tornado, Flood can all have AOE around target, with 50% damage falloff. This makes it so that after using the heal of BOTE in a dungeon pull, spending the buffs granted on Quake Flood and Tornado would be a DPS gain over throwing more Holy's, spicing up our 1 button rotation in AOE too. Tornado could even apply the DOT in an AOE, albeit at the 50% reduced amount. This would still be a big amount of damage to add to any trash pull though, and would give us back Aero 3's AOE DOT potential (but in a new form). Based on the current potency values, and the idea above, the potencies for these AOE effects would be: Holy, 150p to all targets around you. Quake, 410 to main target, 205 in AOE. Flood, 450 to main target, 225 in AOE. Tornado, 180 to main target, 90 in AOE. Tornado's DOT effect, 90 per tick on main target, 45 for all others.

Furthermore, if my maths is right (its probably not), we would get 24 GCDs per minute assuming a 2.50 GCD. 4 of these would be Water/Banish, giving 20 gauge. 5 of these would be Aero/Dia, refreshed once per 12s to give 25 total gauge. This leaves us 15 Stone/Glares per min, giving us 15 gauge, for a total of 60 gauge generated per minute. This would allow for roughly 1 BOTE cast per minute, with some leeway built in (not intentionally, this is pure coincidence) to allow for eg, dropping a Glare to use a Rapture to heal the team, casting your Misery, etc. Because you neither 'lose' nor 'gain' damage from using the BOTE skill, you'd also not need to worry about overcapping due to not needing to heal. Giving the option for super skilled WHMs to shift their BOTE healing vs Lily healing timings around to allow them to get both Misery AND the new Quake/Tornado/Flood into raidbuffs for more raid-DPS is a nice optimisation trick that gives depth to the class for those who seek it

edit again: I decided to try and do the maths on potencies and see how close I could get to the current potency per minute (PPM). As a baseline, not including any buffs like Presence of Mind, external buffs, prepping Misery's, anything, just me VS the dummy in a Glarefest. Currently 1min of combat looks to be 2 Dia's and 22 Glares, totaling 8140 potency. With the addition of Banish and the change to Dia's duration/potency, we'd theoretically get 5 Dia applications, totaling 2150, 4 Banish's at 1400, and the rest is 15 Glare's at 4650, with a grand total of 8200. If I really wanted to, I could probably work out maths to make it match the current total exactly, but I think it's close enough (and it being 8200 looks nice and neat)

Overall, I think what I got here still fits well within the cramped confines of SE's 'simple starter healer' idea for WHM, while giving it's barren treetrunk of a design a few branches, and some extra room to grow from there.
Edit: I've made videos! Don't expect production quality though, they'll be as crappy quality as my MSPaint diagrams. These are to illustrate the Fun Healer Gameplay we get to experience during the downtime of a boss, when no healing needs to be done, and the Potentially Slightly More Fun Healer Gameplay where I try to illustrate how the addition of one button (and the adjustment of one DOT's duration) can very easily spice up an otherwise dull rotation. I probably 'dropped the DOT' or 'clipped the DOT' or whatever because Dia's currently 30s, and I had to mentally picture it as being 12s, so it's kinda wonky gameplay, but I hope it helps to show the idea in motion.

edit: Cure1 evolves into Cure2 (700p, becomes 800 later, 500mp cost), Medica evolves into Medica2(300p, becomes 300p + 150p per tick, then later becomes 400p + 150p per tick). Cure 2 generates 5 Nature Gauge on cast. Regen generates 4 Nature Gauge on cast, and 1 Nature Gauge per tick (total 10). As with Dia above, Regen-ing multiple people will not give extra gauge. It'll give the 'on cast' part, but the ticks will behave as if only one person has the HOT. Medica 2 would generate 3 per tick (total of 15 over full duration), but it'd only consider the copy of the HOT on yourself (no multi-HOT benefits). Cure 3 generates 10 Nature Gauge on cast.

another edit: Additionally, when Medica 2's HOT effect is present on the WHM, the MP cost of Cure 3 is halved (from 1500 to 750), to encourage using it over just spamming Medica 2 over and over (as it'd be changed to 400p, plus 5 ticks of 150p due to combining with Medica 1). This allows for you to generate Nature Gauge even during high pressure heal situations such as end-of-fight enrages, and allows for more use of Cure 3 which is criminally underutilized as it stands

edit: As a further illustration to show the effect of 'what GCDs we use in a 60s loop', we have the top image right now, and this pitch would create the bottom image:

Only 7 Glares a minute! 8, if you want to count Quake and Glare as the same thing (they would share a button ala Inner Chaos on WAR), compared to the 18 we have now per minute

[ForsakenRoe]

Astrologian - Herald of Fate

Now this is where it all falls apart a bit unfortunately, as while I have been known to dabble in other healers, I'm a WHM at heart so most of my thinking about 'wouldn't this be cool' was done with the Ol' Faithful in mind. Nevertheless, I did have an idea for AST that the goofy spectrum diagram allows us to consider. If we are letting WHM have access to some shields (but they aren't amazing compared to SCH shields), why not let AST have access to shields too? We already have Neutral Sect as a cooldown to get access to them sometimes, so I thought: 'What if we bring back sects?'

If we bring back Diurnal and Nocturnal Sect, and make them useable in combat with, say, 2s CD to prevent fat-fingers, we could have a true 'middle ground' healer that can be flexible and adaptable to either situation. Doing reclears and you get a WHM? Stick to Nocturnal more. Get a SCH? Diurnal time. However, this would be different from the bygone days of HW, because we can swap at will. Imagine for example a raidwide with a bleed attached (any resemblance to current raid tier is coincidence). If you mitigate the raidwide, the bleed snapshots and does less damage per tick. If you use a regen, it counteracts the bleed as the HOT fights the DOT. So as an example, raidwide is coming, you could go Nocturnal Sect > Collective Unconscious (the bubble) > Diurnal Sect > Celestial Opposition. This would mitigate the raidwide by 10%, then apply a nice HOT to the team to counter the bleed. Of course potencies might need to be adjusted due to how strong this could potentially be, but we're here for aesthetics, not to have our dreams shot down by the cold reality of math.

Neutral would still remain the big burst CD of 'Thal's Balls! Lots of damage is coming and I definitely need the regen effect AND the shield from Aspected Helios! The 20% heal boost would also be very good here!', but for balance's sake it should probably only affect GCDs. Horoscope could be tweaked to give a shield while in Nocturnal.

For damage, I feel that while the flavour text on the DOT for Combust is great (proximity to a theoretical sun is causing damage), DOTs kinda just... don't make sense to me for a fortuneteller kind of aesthetic. Instead, we can see that AST has a lot of a certain 'design' of skill in it's healing kit, but none in it's DPS kit: Delayed effects. Horoscope, Exaltation, Earthly Star, Macrocosmos, they all make a 'prediction' of sorts, then later on they cash in the effect after X seconds. Some can be triggered early, some can't, but the point is, we predict positive outcomes for our team, why not have negative outcome predictions for our enemies?

As an example, I picture three skills that are GCDs to mix up the 'Malefic Mambo' we have at the moment. These would not conflict with current card windows, because you wouldn't use them during the card windows, you'd set them up beforehand! Popping them all whenever would do fine to clear content too (balance permitting), but to truly optimise would mean lining up the use of these effects so they all land during burst windows. Based on the current damage potency of Fall Malefic (250p) I propose this:

Omen: Asteroid, 15sec CD, 300p, falls after 6 seconds
Omen: Comet, 30sec CD, 350p, falls after 9 seconds
Omen: Starstorm, 60s CD, 400p, falls after 15 seconds

Perhaps the skills could also apply a short 3-6s debuff, that makes the enemy take extra damage from any subsequent Omen skills that land, to reinforce the idea of trying to line them up to land at the same time. However I think the reward of 'more damage from raidbuffs' is probably enough.

While we're here, can Earthly Star's 'Earthly Dominance' buff build up a stack per second up to 10, and at 10 convert to 'Giant Dominance' so that it's power scales more linearly, and popping it at 9s accidentally doesn't scam us out of 25% of it's healing power thank you =)

edit: putting a rework to Cards here, to give them more varied effects while still keeping their damage contributions roughly equal:

Mainly reworks to cards, not adding more damage buttons.

Benefic1 upgrades to Benefic2, as with the other healers. This means that Benefic2 would proc the 'guaranteed crit on next Benefic2' trait, helping in those panic-spamming situations. MP cost of Benefic2 is reduced to 500mp.
Helios upgrades to Aspected Helios, as with the Medica/Medica2 equivalents on WHM

Major Arcana: now autodraws one every 30s. If you have a Major Arcana drawn and the timer hits 0, you 'Spread' the second one, holding it in reserve. At this point, the timer will pause, like capping WHM Lilies.

Minor Arcana: now autodraws a Minor Arcana every 15s. If you have a Minor Arcana drawn and the timer hits 0, you 'Spread' the second one, holding it in reserve. At this point, the timer will pause, like capping WHM Lilies.

Sleeve Draw returns: A 2 charge, 60s charge time OGCD action. When you use it, your currently drawn Minor Arcana becomes a Lady of it's suit. More on Card Ranks in the Minor Arcana section.
Sleeve Draw's purpose is to be a 'bad luck prevention' system, which you can use to force the Minor Arcana you hold (preferably the ones in the burst window) to be the highest potency, so the burst window always feels satisfying to execute.

Draw, Play and Minor Arcana, are replaced with 'Play Major Arcana', 'Play Minor Arcana' and 'Sleeve Draw'. Playing Major Arcana is still OGCD, but Playing Minor Arcana are now GCD (to break up the Malefic spam). This means you can go Minor, Major, Minor Major (interspersed with Sleeve Draws as needed) in your burst window, should you be good enough to calculate ahead of the window who you need to target with each card at each step. If you need time to calculate your next move, however, you would be able to simply cast Malefic to buy yourself another 2.5s to consider the state of your cards

Now for Card effects:

Balance: 10% damage, 15s

Bole: 20% damage mitigation, 15s. Additionally, grants 3 stacks of Bole's Bulwark, causing the enemy that strikes the bearer of this buff to take 10% of that ally's Max HP as damage and consuming one stack.

Arrow: Grants 10 stacks of 'Arrow's Assault' (12 if the target is PhysRanged), increasing Autoattack rate by 400%. One stack is consumed for each Autoattack dealt under it's effect, and upon consuming all stacks, the Autoattack rate returns to normal.
Additionally, if the target of this card is the AST, grants 5 stacks of Arrow's Assault, speeding up the recast time of the AST to 1.5s for the next 5 GCD attacks, and making cast times of those spells instant.

Ewer: Grants 1000mp over 15s. Additionally, if the target is a Healer, grants 3 stacks of Ewer Overflowing, causing the next 3 attacks dealt by said healer to strike a second time for 100% of the spell's potency. Additional effects are not applied. This second strike cannot crit or DHit

Spear: 10% Physical damage, 15s. Additionally, if the target of this card is the AST, all magic damage dealt by the AST is instead considered physical for the duration, allowing them to benefit from this card's effect

Spire: 10% Magic damage, 15s

A Note on Minor Arcana: Knaves, Lords, Ladies are 7, 8 and 9 respectively. Due to not having a duration, these effects will last on the target until they are overwritten by another card, or KO removes them.

X of Staves: Increases the next 5 attacks dealt by the target ally by 60p. Additionally, increases the damage of the first attack dealt by target ally after this effect is applied, by 5 potency multiplied by the face value of the arcana.

X of Rings: Deals 100p in counterattack damage each time the target ally is struck, up to 3 times. Additionally, deals an additional 5 potency, multiplied by the face value of the arcana, for the first counterattack only.

X of Knives: Causes the next 6 Autoattacks to deal a second strike for 50p. Additionally, a bonus potency equal to the arcana face value is applied to each of these bonus strikes.
(if the concept of 'potency value not divisible by 5' is too much for the engine, make it 'first autoattack has bonus damage of '5 x face value'')

X of Cups: Causes the next 3 healer damage spells to cost half MP, and to strike a second time for 100p. Additional effects are not applied twice. Additionally, the first of these spells deals bonus damage equal to 5 potency, multiplied by the face value of the arcana

X of Crowns: Increases the next 5 instances of Magic damage dealt by 60p. Additionally, a bonus potency equal to the arcana face value is applied to each of these bonus strikes.
(if the concept of 'potency value not divisible by 5' is too much for the engine, make it 'first instance of magic damage has bonus damage of '5 x face value'')

X of Irons: Increases the next 5 instances of Physical damage dealt by 60p. Additionally, a bonus potency equal to the arcana face value is applied to each of these bonus strikes. Additionally, if the target of this card is the AST, the next 5 instances of magic damage are instead considered physical, allowing them to benefit from this card's effect
(if the concept of 'potency value not divisible by 5' is too much for the engine, make it 'first instance of physical damage has bonus damage of '5 x face value'')

The card effects (in terms of their damage output) have all been balanced against one another. In current Anabesios BIS, the Majors were tuned around all contributing roughly 30000 points of damage with their effect (numbers taken from several Samurai). Minor Arcana are balanced around dealing 300p, plus an additional 10-45p, based on RNG of the card and its Face Value. The one notable exception to this, which would be 'way stronger than anything else', would be Ewer and its effect of duplicating Healer spells, due to the difference between the strongest hit for SCH (Broil, 295) and SGE (Phlegma, 660). Or, if you prefer, WHM's Misery (1320). I could create some system wherein certain stronger skills consume more stacks than others to remedy this should it be such a pressing issue (eg it grants 5 stacks, Misery costs all 5 stacks, Glare and its equivalents cost 1, Phlegma costs 2, something like that)

Lastly, Minor Arcana would presumably also contribute Seals like their Major counterparts. As such, AST gameplay could revolve more around maintaining Astrodyne as a Huton style self-speed-buff, rather than the current odd 'slight buff for damage windows but it actually is a 90s effect in a 2min meta so it doesn't really fit very well'. Potencies of the Astrodyne effects would be changed to suit this, of course. I just haven't done the maths for that. Alternatively, we could just remove Astrodyne because it kinda sucks.

Final thoughts, AST is a very cool concept for a healer, but I can't play it very well as it stands due to it's high APM in burst windows with the current cards. It's healing toolkit is absolutely solid, so just leaning into it's fate-reading and ally-support identity a bit more on the DPS side of things is all it really needs to make it feel different from it's neighbors in the healer role.

[ForsakenRoe]

Scholar - The Genius Tactician

The original design for Scholar was one of battlefield tactics, of outmaneuvering the opponent, winning an unwinnable fight through planning and mastery of the combat area. It even has a skill called Art of War! It also had some traces of 'combat medic' going for it, with such things as Leeches as it's Esuna equivalent, and several DOTs in it's kit hinting at a knowledge of various poisons and their effect on the body. Since Shadowbringers released, Scholars the world over have felt their identity crumble away, with most of the DOTs being removed and the fairy being changed from 'you can use her actions while you're casting stuff because she's a seperate entity!' to 'you press an OGCD and then the fairy does that OGCD, but kinda delayed if she's busy casting embrace'. It's a bit more responsive nowadays sure, and we're very glad for it, but when it comes down to it, looking at current SCH I am not really sure what it's identity even is. Sage took it's 'Combat Medic' deal, too, so poor SCH is kinda stuck. The main thing that stands out is the fairy, being able to have your healing come from a location that is not 'the Scholar' is a very interesting idea, and maybe one that we could lean into more.

Unfortunately, as mentioned above, I'm WHM main, so when I have to shield heal, I'm probably Sage. As such, I can only say that i think the aesthetics for SCH should play off of the fairy, for example, what if we could target the fairy with skills? If we made it possible to use a skill on the fairy, and that skill is stored (overwritten by other skills), maybe Deployment Tactics tells the fairy 'Hey, spread out the skill I stored on you!', allowing us new interactions. We all know Deploy-Adlo is strong in it's own right, but it kinda sucks we have to spend a GCD to set the Adlo up, right? But if we set Adlo as the 'stored skill' on the fairy pre-pull, we could Deploy from the fairy when we need it, with just the OGCD of Deployment Tactics, and the fairy would remember the Adlo for later uses, allowing SCH to be more the 'Barrier healer' it's claimed to be! Alternatively, if you dont need Adlo for a fight, maybe a Deployed Excogitation across the team to help heal up after the raidwide would be good? A Deployed Lustrate for instant healing, or a personal favourite idea, Deploying your DOTs as a way to bring back Bane (without needing the button for it, we don't have much room).

Alternatively, reworking Deployment Tactics into a skill that makes the fairy duplicate our next action (with certain restrictions). Thinking about it more, this feels more 'doable' within the engine, and probably less of a nightmare of balancing. As examples, Deploy > Adlo would put Adlo on a target, then the fairy would copy it and place 'Fey Adlo' on the same target, stacking the two shields for a big shield. Deploy > Succor would function as a current DeployAdlo combo does, creating a very fat raidwide shield. Deploy Indom would allow the SCH some extra burst healing, or more interestingly, the ability to use Indom to heal far away players (for example, placing the fairy over the far team in Ruby Light 5 in P5S, to Fey Indom the far team, and regular Indom the close team)

Of course, we can't mention Scholar without mentioning bringing back the DOTs, so lets have:

Biolysis: 30s duration
Miasma: 24s duration
The third one: 18s duration

I'm bad with names, I'm sure SE can come up with some 'poisonous sounding word' for that third DOT. EDIT: SHADOWFLARE WHY DID I FORGET SHADOWFLARE

The last idea I had was to rework Energy Drain. As it stands it's a nice tool for optimising, but on the flipside, it leads to people doing really weird stuff like 'not using Soil in week 1 prog', it's not even strong it's 100p. What I thought of was basically a bit like Sage, using your healing kit should not come as a DPS loss, but on the flip side using your healing kit should not be a gain. So:

Energy Drain now a 60s CD, replacing Aetherflow, this is how you'll get your stacks now, like SMN (if you can't target anything you get the stacks but dont do damage)

A new Gauge under the Fey Gauge (or split the Fey Gauge into an upper green half and a lower, orange half)

Spending Aetherflow grants 10 Fey Gauge and 10 Pixie Pranks Pixie Tricks Gauge (Come on Samantha, you're slipping)

A new skill we learned while Feo Ul was giving us hell in the First, Fey Meltdown:
Fey Meltdown consumes all of the Pixie gauge, costs at least 20, scales in potency based on how much is consumed
Fey Meltdown is a line AOE from the fairy, to the target designated by the SCH, hitting target and all in the line AOE
Fey Meltdown also applies a debuff to those hit, one stack per 10 gauge spent, increasing damage taken from Broil by 30p per stack, or Art Of War by 10 for AOE situations

Just a new skill to give us more interplay with the fairy, maybe make it's positioning have a bit of relevance, and empower the SCH during burst windows because it's a little bit sad when you use Chain Stratagem and still nothing crits. The idea is that it'd play like MCH's robot or BRD's Apex Arrow, where you want to use it within raidbuffs. However, unlike Apex Arrow, using this skill at lower amounts would not be a 'DPS loss', instead clever 'early uses' would let you regulate how much you have going into a raidbuff window with, causing 'DPS gain'. Perhaps by spending the 40 you have now, you make sure you'll hit the raidbuff window with 80 instead of overcapping, or being forced to use at 100 and missing the window.

edit: adding some ideas from a while ago that I forgot to add, re: DOT potencies. These assume Broil 5 is a thing, and that it is 300p (names WIP).

Biolysisis: 30s duration, 35p per tick (total 350p)
Mias-malady: 1.5s cast time, 24s duration, 100p on cast, 30p per tick (total 340p)
Shadowflare: Instantcast, 150p AOE centered on enemy. Drops a puddle under enemy for 12s (limit of one puddle), 50p per tick. Total 350p per enemy. Due to numbers, it's a gain to upkeep in AOE, instead of just using AOW.

2024 edit: Before I forget, another idea to go along with the extra DOTs added above:

Bane: upgrade from Energy Drain at level... idk something fairly low, maybe move ED back down to level 6-ish and make this be 45-50 area. Still costs 1 Aetherflow
Deals damage with a potency of 100, and 50% less to nearby targets
Additional effect: Spreads Bio and Miasma effects (or upgraded counterparts) to nearby targets, resetting the duration of the effects to their maximum.
Potency of effects is reduced by 40% for secondary targets afflicted.

Now Multi-DOT management isn't as big a problem in massive pulls, and the skill retains its current functionality on singletarget

[ForsakenRoe]

Sage - Combat Chirurgeon

Not gonna lie, I have almost zero idea what to do with Sage just because it is so new. When it was first announced to be the 'Do damage to heal the team' healer, I'm sure most of us thought of Disc Priest from 'That Other MMO Down The Road', but instead what we got was 'targettable embrace'. Don't get me wrong, being able to force the passive healing onto one target is nice and all, but it's also kinda bland considering what we could have had.

The main thing everyone and their mother has suggested is simply a cooldown that allows us to spread Kardia to the party for a bit, and heal the whole team via Kardia and DPSing. However, I'd like to go a bit differently, and suggest that we add that effect to Kerachole, to make it slightly different from the other healer's bubbles. Haima and Panhaima are pretty cool and different to what we've seen before so they get a pass. Pepsis honestly feels like it was thrown on there just to have an equivalent to Emergency Tactics, without considering that ET was made for the times where SCH needs burst healing, and that SGE can choose to use regular Prognosis while SCH can't.

Overall I really can't think of anything for Sage's DPS rotation, so I'll just admit I'm stumped and defer to other suggestions on this section of the forum. Since we have 'burst WHM, DOT SCH and delayed effects AST', maybe Sage's rotation could be 'proc based DPS'? It is based on ancient greek medical knowledge, four humours, etc so a very reactive and 'see what happens' kind of gameplay that procs would create might fit the aesthetic?

One thing that does really wind me up though, is that we get Toxicon at 66, then at 82 it's replaced by Toxicon 2. Why is this an issue? Because Toxicon 1 is THE Sage animation, it's in the trailer and everything, so my suggestion for Sage is that we remove Toxicon 2's animation because Toxicon 1 looks better (or at least give me the option)

EDIT: Okay I was chatting to some people I fill in for in raids sometimes, and we collectively had an idea for Sage that could be a bit interesting. Two versions, in fact! The idea is to lean fully into the aesthetic and lore of Sage being a practitioner of medicine. It'd take a little bit of a reworking of some skills to get there, but I think it'd add a very dynamic rotation to the class that none of the other classes have at the moment (or in fact, would have if the other suggestions I posed here were implemented), so, as Mr Medic TF2 once said:


Version one: the proc-based practitioner. The long and short of this would be that we have 4 (yes, four!) skills on our hotbar, each with 2 charges. Original idea was to name them after the four humours (blood, blackbile, yellowbile and phlegm), but Haima is Blood, and Phlegma is Phlegm, and Addersgall is probably referring to Gall Bladder Bile (the black one) so the naming might need some work... Anyway, continuing the idea pitch under the assumption that SE finds a way to give cool names to these buttons, they would all be OGCDs, and have a unique trait: they don't restore charges over time. Instead, Dosis will proc one of the four to restore a charge at random. The two charges are so that if you rolled the same one twice, you would have time to react without overcapping. Potentially, we could have a 'Flourish' equivalent to give 1 charge back to each, but this may make the class too busy and cause some to focus more on the damage than putting up shields and mitigation. Still, a very proc-based rotation would be a different flavor for a healer, and would lead to a very 'experimental medicine' feel.

Version two: Chemist Copium. Long and short of this one is we'd need 5 (or maybe just 3) buttons for this one. Again, 4 for each of the humours, and one to start the new mechanic. I'm calling it Medical Malpractice for now, but I've never been good at names. Anyway, pressing this new button would be very much like starting a dance on Dancer, but instead of dance steps, we're throwing chemicals into a Mix as a homage to Chemist. Since we're never getting it as an actual class, we can salvage design pieces from it that fit our current classes, and Mixing fits a doctor themed class IMO. Here, I think Mix would have to play more like DNC than NIN, as there's 4 humours rather than 3 mudras. Unless we say Addersgall represents one of the two biles? Anyway, every X seconds, we'd press Medical Malpractice, see what chemical we've got to create on our job gauge, press the corresponding buttons (we could even use the P8S elemental chemical icons, no trees or snakes), then press the MM button again to create and throw the concoction to do 'big damage, with AOE falloff' like dances do, but centered on the enemy instead of the player. To save on button space on this idea, we could use Eukrasia to convert two of the 'chemicals' into the other two, EG: using Eukrasia turns Phlegma into 'the blood one', or 'yellow bile one' into 'black bile one'. This would drop the amount of hotbar space needed considerably, and having the two bile's be a pairing makes it easier to remember which button becomes which when Eukrasia'd. As long as we don't get locked out of doing other actions while we're 'Practicing Medicine' or whatever the buff would be called, we can safely heal as needed while preparing our chemical concoction.

Might think about how to name the skills more, leaning towards 'the four dispositions' which would mean some forms of 'Sanguine, Melancholy, Choleric, Phlegmatic' but that last one is very similar to what we have now... Then again, if Phlegma was reworked to be a part of this system it'd work...now to figure out how to do something with Toxicon so it doesn't feel like quite such a daunting loss of DPS

Edit again (yes again): Moving a Sage idea here so it's all in one place. If I link to this post via a different post, it's probably because I'm shilling this idea specifically, due to it having the most thought put in of the three.

1: Dosis, Pneuma, Diagnosis, Prognosis, Dyskrasia and Phlegma, and any Eukrasian variants thereof (in other words, everything that currently has MP costs) now costs ZERO MP.

2: Soteria, Krasis, Zoe now have a 5 second cooldown, and an MP cost (maybe 1000 idk). Eukrasia now has an MP cost, albeit slightly lower (maybe 700, comparatively speaking)

3: E.Diagnosis, E.Prognosis and E.Dosis now have their base form's potency, with the additional effect being just that, additional, potencies adjusted to compensate. This means E.Diagnosis is 450p, with a shield equal to 120% of HP restored. E.Prognosis is 300p, shield equal to 100% of HP restored (yes it went down by 20p, it's not a big deal). E.Dosis now does 330p up-front damage, with a DOT effect of 35 for 30sec (same total, but half of it is now frontloaded). Currently, if you accidentally Eukrasia before a cast but don't need the Eukrasia, you have to either click it off (clunky) or suck up the loss of effectiveness. With this, all you lose is the MP cost. Which still sucks, just not as much.

4: Toxicon now has a 5sec cooldown, and an MP cost. Toxicon 2 is removed. Addersting is reworked as a resource into a 0-100 gauge. Addersgall is reworked into a 0-100 gauge. Addersgall is generated both passively at a rate of 1 per second, and actively via the class's skills. All previous costs of 'one Addersgall' now cost 25 Addersgall. Yes this means you can pool 4 Druocholes instead of 3.

5: A new button, Pankardia (MP cost 1000), is added as a level 68 skill. It's effect would be 'Applies 4 stacks of PanKardion to all nearby allies. When Kardion heals, every ally with PanKardion receives a heal of the same potency, consuming one stack per Kardion heal triggered.'

6: Soteria has it's effect changed to 'Applies 4 stacks of Soteria to self. Each Kardion heal is increased by 50% of the damage dealt by the attack that triggered the heal, consuming one stack. Area-Effect skills only count the primary target.'

7: Zoe has it's effect changed to 'Applies 4 stacks of Zoe to self. Causes Kardion and Pankardion to additionally apply a barrier, equal to 25% of the amount healed by the original effect, consuming one stack. Multiple applications of this barrier may overlap, strengthening the barrier's effectiveness. Does not stack with Eukrasian Prognosis.'

8: Krasis has it's effect changed to 'Applies 4 stacks of Krasis to self. Allows any non-instant spell to be cast with zero cast time, consuming one stack.'

9: Toxicon has it's effect changed to 'Drains the Addersting Gauge to 0, and applies 4 stacks of Toxicon to self. Offensive spells have increased potency, scaling based on how much Addersting was consumed. Consumes one stack per offensive spell used.' (at the moment, I'm thinking a 1:1 rate, so 100 gauge is 100p boost for 4 hits, but this can be spent earlier if needed, to reset the gauge to 0 and re-jig when you hit 100 to line up with raidbuffs better, for optimization gamers to play with)

10: Triggering a Kardion heal in any way generates 1 Addersting. Spending Soteria, Zoe and Krasis stacks have the additional effect of 'Increases Addersting gauge by 4.' (All 4 stacks total up to 16 gauge, 20 in total due to the Kardion triggering) Eukrasia grants 8 gauge on use. Spending Toxicon charges causes the Addersgall gauge to increase by 4 each. Addersgall spenders still retain their MP restoration effects, but the MP restoration potency might be rebalanced.

11: Phlegma has a 'Eukrasian' variant, which is a target-based circle AOE (like Phlegma currently is), does 50% of your current Phlegma's damage to the target and all enemies near it (and consumes a charge of Phlegma), but additionally applies Eukrasian Dosis to all targets hit for 15 seconds (this would mean a total potency of 475 per target in an AOE, over 15 sec), and uses Phlegma's current animation. Main Phlegma now uses Toxicon 1's animation, because it's our hardest hit and that animation is in the trailer for the game so it deserves to be front and center.

12: Rhizomata has it's effect changed to 'Adds 25 Addersgall. Causes the next MP cost to be reduced to 0. Duration: 10sec.'

13: Eukrasian Diagnosis' shield break effect changed from 'Grants one Addersting' to 'Grants Phlegmatic, allowing the cast of Phlegma without spending a charge'. This would not be a 100% refund (600 vs 660 of 2x Dosis), but it's better than what we have now. Also, going into a burst window with a E.Diagnosis, then spending your Phlegmatic charge, followed by the natural 2 Phlegma charges is probably a DPS gain for those optimization types, and would be a bit like DRK banking it's Dark Arts charge for raidbuffs

14: Pepsis now costs 500mp, has a very low CD (maybe 5sec), and generates 8 Addersting on use (even if it doesn't do anything you get the gauge). When Eukrasian Diagnosis or Eukrasian Prognosis break, they leave a buff on that player called Second Opinion for about 5 seconds. When Pepsis is used, it consumes Second Opinion to heal that player for the amount of HP the barrier protected for. Essentially, if you ever played a Character Action game like Viewtiful Joe, Wonderful 101, whatever, and used the Ukemi (jump button right as you land, instantly heal back the damage you took), it's that with a bit more leniency. And it gives Pepsis a much more interesting use case.

With something like this, I don't think having a damage kit of just 'Dosis, E.Dosis, Phlegma' is necessarily that bad. Like AST, the 'fun gameplay' doesn't necessarily come from the actual attacking, but how your kit interacts with your attacking, and in this case, with your healing too. Augments would resolve in a set order-of-operations, being Krasis, Toxicon, Soteria, Pankardia, Zoe. In other words, the game would check, in order, if you can instantcast via Krasis (Swiftcast would still be prioritized), then do the damage/heal calculation stuff. As an example, lets take a Dosis cast, at 330 potency, and the Kardia heal of 170 that it triggers, and follow it. We Toxicon that damage (my Dosis currently hits for about 10k before crit/DHit) and increase the potency of that hit, so this Dosis we're looking at is now 430p (becasue we spent 100 gauge to boost it). Next, we take 50% of the damage it deals (it's now dealing 13000ish, so 6500) and add that to the Kardia heal (for me, that's about 4500). So now our total heal is 11000. Next, we spread it to everyone at a 1:1 ratio via Pankardia. Lastly, we apply a shield of 2750 on top of the heal, to everyone.

Chances are you'd get 2-3 GCDs in while a boss casts the castbar for it's big raidwide, so that'd be a roughly 8250 shield due to it stacking on itself. And remember, it can't be applied alongside E.Prognosis, so if a boss has some way to chip away at shields before a raidwide (eg, the bleed from Aionagonia that ticks right up until Dominion is cast in P8S, or the whole of Firestorms of Asphodelos in general back in P3S with it's fire rain), that's gonna mess with your 'setup window'. Also, my Prognosis heals me for about 7.3k before crit, so the above rework would mean that, to equal E.Prognosis, this shield would have to have 2.5 untouched applications stacked up. No bleeds or raidwides or anything messing with it.

'Wait a second, 10k regen per hit, and building up to a 'potentially 11k shield on the whole party? That doesn't sound right, that sounds OP! Pure healers would be dead on arrival, etc' Well, yes and no. See, while it's 'theoretically possible', the factors that go into it would be ridiculous and never actually play out in practice. To put up that healing would require using all four augments at once, and with their 4 stack limit, you'd either have to quadweave them to get them all lined up (which noone would want to do) or have their durations staggered. You could Krasis and doubleweave effects together, getting you 3 stacks of 'everything is lined up', but then you have the other issue of pulling this off: MP costs. Applying 4 of these augments, plus the Krasis for swiftcasting to get them lined up better, would run you 4000 MP. Almost half your entire bar! Yes it's theoretically possible to do it, but you'd probably not need this amount of healing, and would rather juggle your Addersgall tools to reduce the amount of different augments you're applying, because you'd rather use the MP in a more rationed out way, to keep your other tools being used effectively and not letting them overcap, etc. I'm fairly sure some other stuff would need to be changed about too, such as removing the regen trait from Kerachole (or changing it to a barrier, cos, y'know, we're a barrier healer) to incentivize actually using these augments.

By having Toxicon and the new Addersting gauge be a damage increasing effect granted by Augment Stack consumption, Addersgall being refreshed faster by Toxicon consumption, and MP being restored by Addersgall consumption, we create a cycle of 'Spend A to get more B, spend B to get more C, spend C to get more A'. Ideally I'd want a 4th resource in the cycle to really lean into the identity of 'everything is 4' I seem to have made, but that might just be bloat for the sake of it. Either way, this I think would create a very different playstyle to the current healers, being as we're spending MP not on our healing, but on how we augment that healing. This has additional side effects too, for the more casual side of the playerbase. First and foremost is the fact that, if the base healing kit is MP-Free, we can spam it as much as we want. There's no need for anyone to say 'oh but what about the new healers this will be overwhelming' because if there's a panic situation, we can spam Prognosis and it is completely free. Eukrasian Prognosis, that still costs though.

Secondly, and this is purely by accident I swear, but this actually makes Piety be more than just 'OK I have enough now it's a dead stat'! See, if you generate more MP than you need, you can't really do anything with it in the current game, it's just...there. With this however, in the same way that we dump spare Addersgalls on Druochole just for the MP restore, we can dump spare mana on Krasis or Soteria or whatever. Why? Because spending those stacks gets us Addersting gauge, which gets us to Toxicon, and Toxicon gets us more damage! By getting more Toxicon uses in the fight, it would help to offset the 'less damage' that comes from having more Piety on your gear. Of course, careful balancing would need to be done to make sure 'stack Piety on purpose for more uptime on Toxicon' is not the prevalent strategy. Or maybe it wouldn't? Maybe 'Crit isnt the best stat by a country mile' would actually be a great breath of fresh air for the game?

Overall though, I think this would allow for a completely different mindset on how we heal, vs how we do damage. Everything feeds into each other in a cycle, incentivizing intelligent rotation of resources to overcap as little as possible, and clever use of which augment skill and when would allow for a real 'damage done = more healing done' aesthetic via Pankardia and Soteria. I didn't even need to remove any buttons from the class (not even Pepsis!), instead only needing to add one, Pankardia. If we do need to remove a button to make room though, I'd nominate Pepsis though. Nothing suggested is the 'be all end all', but I think it's fairly telling that people all have ideas for the class, and seem to have gone in completely different directions on it. It really shows, to me at least, how much room there is for growth for the class, beyond it's current form as 'SCH without fairy jank'.

[ForsakenRoe]

THE FIFTH HEALER...? (not clickbait)

Now, while we have 4 healers, and we could arrange them like in the chart above, the question still remains, what if we have a 5th healer? Well, with the old stinky 2x2 grid SE's enforced on us we're out of room and out of luck, but with the spectrum we can slot a new healer in anywhere we like! Furthermore, since Sage was added as a Barrier healer, I believe the perfect location to put a new healer would be...



With a spectrum of Pure vs Barrier Capability, it's pretty simple to just slot in a new healer wherever, and tune their Pure vs Barrier outputs accordingly. Since we have already got the paradigms we've got, I think a fair amount of people are crying out for a HOT based healer (Time Mage?), especially in this game where damage comes in waves and is staggered by such long amounts of 'nothing's happening for X seconds'. As for their mitigation side of their kit, I doubt the engine could handle it but I'd love to see a healer that slows the incoming damage from a burst down into a DOT, 'staggering' it if you will. This would synergise with both Pure healers (because they can easily Pure heal through the DOT) and Barrier healers (because the Barriers would block the DOT ticks while they hold, and their mitigations would make the DOTs tick for less), and they'd synergise with themself because they'd turn the burst of damage into a DOT, place a HOT, and the two would counteract each other quite nicely. Add in some ways to manipulate the HOTs by extending them, instantly collapsing them for burst healing if needed for White Hole, etc and there we go, new healer

FINAL THOUGHTS

If you made it here thanks for reading, I don't expect anyone to agree with all of my ramblings (or any, to be frank), but I needed something to do while waiting for PF to become alive for the day. Leave some comments, suggest changes, tell me my maths is off, complain that SE needs to listen to healer issues, yadda yadda

Join me next time when I complain about BLU and suggest how to make it a real class (nobody's done that one yet I'm sure)

ps sorry for bad art, I thought it'd be a quaint joke but I really can't draw and after the first I just committed to the bit

[Raikai]

THE FIFTH HEALER...? (not clickbait)

Now, while we have 4 healers, and we could arrange them like in the chart above, the question still remains, what if we have a 5th healer? Well, with the old stinky 2x2 grid SE's enforced on us we're out of room and out of luck, but with the spectrum we can slot a new healer in anywhere we like! Furthermore, since Sage was added as a Barrier healer, I believe the perfect location to put a new healer would be...



With a spectrum of Pure vs Barrier Capability, it's pretty simple to just slot in a new healer wherever, and tune their Pure vs Barrier outputs accordingly. Since we have already got the paradigms we've got, I think a fair amount of people are crying out for a HOT based healer (Time Mage?), especially in this game where damage comes in waves and is staggered by such long amounts of 'nothing's happening for X seconds'. As for their mitigation side of their kit, I doubt the engine could handle it but I'd love to see a healer that slows the incoming damage from a burst down into a DOT, 'staggering' it if you will. This would synergise with both Pure healers (because they can easily Pure heal through the DOT) and Barrier healers (because the Barriers would block the DOT ticks while they hold, and their mitigations would make the DOTs tick for less), and they'd synergise with themself because they'd turn the burst of damage into a DOT, place a HOT, and the two would counteract each other quite nicely. Add in some ways to manipulate the HOTs by extending them, instantly collapsing them for burst healing if needed for White Hole, etc and there we go, new healer

FINAL THOUGHTS

If you made it here thanks for reading, I don't expect anyone to agree with all of my ramblings (or any, to be frank), but I needed something to do while waiting for PF to become alive for the day. Leave some comments, suggest changes, tell me my maths is off, complain that SE needs to listen to healer issues, yadda yadda

Join me next time when I complain about BLU and suggest how to make it a real class (nobody's done that one yet I'm sure)

ps sorry for bad art, I thought it'd be a quaint joke but I really can't draw and after the first I just committed to the bit

This makes a lot of sense.

They literally made healer balance not be future-proof by defining those binary roles. They will have to change a lot by adding a fifth healer. It kind of makes me wonder if AST and possible 7.0 healer changes are going to observe that.

[ForsakenRoe]

This makes a lot of sense.

They literally made healer balance not be future-proof by defining those binary roles. They will have to change a lot by adding a fifth healer. It kind of makes me wonder if AST and possible 7.0 healer changes are going to observe that.

I dunno what the future holds (which probably explains why I'm not so good at AST), but I was thinking recently, and this bump to my thread gives me a good opportunity to air the thought: Ranged and Casters are suffering behind Melee atm, due to the Melee having higher potency to account for loss of uptime. But there's no uptime lost this tier, every boss has almost 100% uptime (Carb dashes lose you maybe 1 GCD whoa end of the world). So, the solution to address that imbalance would be either A: Add potency to Ranged and Caster to compensate for the fact that the Ranged Tax is not really justified anymore, or B: go back to designing bosses with Melee downtime, causing Melee players to be annoyed because they can't hit the boss. Personally I'd prefer to see B, as optimizing the strat to remove downtime is a huge part of the optimization process (eg, Uptime Unreal for Hello World vs regular Unreal being safer for PF), but there's every chance SE goes with A moving forward.

If we do end up with 100% (or close to it) Melee uptime on a boss, what reason would there be to not have a Melee Healer? That is, a healer that attacks with Melee hits, but has some Non-Melee backup skills to fall back on when the boss is not targetable/ it's not safe to be in melee. Medica equivalent and such. But building gauge to spend on OGCDs could be done via Melee attacks, there could be a gauge spender that, IDK, does damage and applies a 'Judgement of Light' effect to the boss, making anyone who hits the boss receive a heal for a duration (or a number of attacks, JOL lasts 25 attacks now I think). Or we could have the class have a focus on HOTs and DOTs, with the melee strikes manipulating those effects. I wonder if we ever saw a character who has ways to manipulate the flow of time, who also uses a Melee weapon. Maybe a hammer...?