New Caster

[Renathras]

I honestly cannot understand this fascination some people have with DoTs. To hear some people talk, DoTs are the pinnacle of game design, and every Job that doesn't have one is missing out. Like when someone loves some random thing like peanut butter and pickle sandwiches and insists everyone MUST have a bite and they'll REALLY like it if they just give it a chance.

No, SMN doesn't need a DoT. Nothing about "powerful magi that summon primal deities to unleash destruction on their foes" says "slap some poison on someone and watch it slowly tick of a few dozen health every 3 seconds".

I get that DoTs CAN be interesting if a kit is built around them and there are interesting interactions. But they are absolutely not the end-all, be-all of innovative and engaging game mechanic and rotation design. In many cases, they're lazy busywork to make a Job look like it has more going on than it does. Remove the DoTs from the healers and you see all they have otherwise is a spam nuke and a flavor of big hitting instant cast nuke on a CD (Misery/Assize, Earthy Star/Macrocosmos, Plegma/Pneuma), with SCH being the only odd man out here since its other DPS buttons are Ruin 2 as a slight DPS loss movement tool and Energy Drain as an oGCD resource expending button for a bit of extra damage when optimizing the encounter. But because that damn DoT is there on each of them, people can say "well, they have this thing they're maintaining and optimizing under raid buffs and using as a weave/movement tool!" when you could replace any of them with Ruin 2 and nothing of value would be lost. Except for SCH, who would now have two copies of Ruin 2. XD [Honorable mention to SGE Toxicon which WOULD be an interesting ability if it wasn't a DPS loss to do the thing required to generate more Addersting stacks...]

EDIT (for space):


Either way, DoTs aren't terrible when a class is built around them. Old Fester doing more damage based on DoTs you have on the target is one such example, as was Bane to spread them from one target to a group of enemies. BLM Thundercloud procs is another, and I may be misremembering, but I think SB era SMN's Ruin 4 proced off of its DoTs or...something like that. WoW's Druid had a HoT (heal, not DoT) that stacked to 3, and when you refreshed it, would refresh all 3 stacks, so it was an ability you wanted to slightly clip and keep up on the tank so you'd maintain the three stacks, as letting it fall off would mean applying 3 stacks again. While that's in practice just hitting the DoT ever X seconds after the initial 3 applications, it's at least a BIT more interesting. BRD has two DoTs but a separate ability that can refresh them both at once (Iron Jaws) and I think they have a chance of procing its oGCD shots during one of its songs. NIN has Doton and SMN Slipstream (and at one time Shadowflare) to set ground damage fields. PLD and GNB both have an AOE oGCD to apply area DoTs, and WHM used to have a ranged casted one (Aero 3) and SCH a point blank AOE around themselves instant cast (Miasma 2...or 3? I forget which...)

If you combined all of those things together into a single Job, it might be possible to make an interesting DoT based Job.

But most of the DoTs we have in the game right now, if simply replaced with direct damage spells and normalized, wouldn't change how Jobs play or function at all and nothing of value would be lost other than super high end players trying to wedge those into 2 minute burst windows to optimize damage. Which would at least be a SMIDGE more interesting.

...seriously, I don't get people's love of (at least stand-alone and boring) DoTs...

But yes, leaving a healer as it is today, making SCH SB again, giving one healer a DoT-less 1-2-3 rotation or some simple rotation like just the RDM caster phase or a simplified pendulum BLM ice/fire thing (which is kinda what RDM has going for it, come to think of it...) wouldn't be horrible. It's the only role in the game where all of them are NEARLY identical in terms of their general rotation and most of their button presses. Free up a few DoT/debuff slots on the boss that way, too.

[Seraphor]

But most of the DoTs we have in the game right now, if simply replaced with direct damage spells and normalized, wouldn't change how Jobs play or function at all and nothing of value would be lost other than super high end players trying to wedge those into 2 minute burst windows to optimize damage. Which would at least be a SMIDGE more interesting.

It wouldn't even change that due to snapshotting.

If a skill deals 800 potency in one hit, or 800 potency over the course of 30 seconds, as long as you get it in that buff window you're getting 100% value out of it.

This is why I discount all of the DoTs which do not require 100% uptime or have any kind of cooldown.

But yes, leaving a healer as it is today, making SCH SB again, giving one healer a DoT-less 1-2-3 rotation or some simple rotation like just the RDM caster phase or a simplified pendulum BLM ice/fire thing (which is kinda what RDM has going for it, come to think of it...) wouldn't be horrible. It's the only role in the game where all of them are NEARLY identical in terms of their general rotation and most of their button presses. Free up a few DoT/debuff slots on the boss that way, too.

Ironically Sage would be the best contender for this as they're already required to maintain DPS uptime to ensure effective use of Kardia.

[WlyemR]

Inb4 Yoshi P appears on camera wearing a Captain Planet shirt.

[Nizzi]

Healer DoT is effectively 30%-50% of their overall damage no? Seems like a pretty bad change to make and frontloading all the DoTs onto Scholar will make it more desired for being the big damage healer.

Healers in my experience say it's bad enough they only have 1 or 2 attack buttons to press.

It's not, it's more like 10-20% of their total damage if maintained properly, but that damage could be easily frontloaded into a 30s CD and practically nothing would change as the current healer meta is that an overwhelming majority of all healer damage comes from Glare/Broil/Malefic/Dosis and nothing else. I just looked at the top WHM's log for P8S p2 and Dia accounted for less damage total (13%) than 6 casts of Misery did (16%).
The point in returning SCH's DoTs wouldn't be to make it a big damage healer, nor would it be about increasing SCH's DPS - returning the DoTs would enable the potency of Broil to be lowered and in turn allow for SCH to use Adlo and Succor more proactively at less of a damage loss than it is now.

The DoTs on all of the healers right are superfluous, and maybe there'd be more of an argument for their existence on every healer if they actually did something. For as much as I've disagreed with Renathras at times, I am in full agreement on this point. WHY does every healer have to have a DoT, and furthermore why a DoT that does exactly the same thing? They're all 30s instant cast DoTs... and that's it. Dia is only the slightest bit different in that it has upfront potency of 20 when it's pressed, but this is largely more that Aero always had that from ARR onward rather than any distinct design decision in EW justifying for why that's the case, in my opinion.
Disregarding that as it's not really important, what do these DoTs meaningfully do to healer kits? Every healer presses it twice a minute and that's it. That's the extent of the interaction. At most (on SCH, the healer I mained for years - I assume its the same on SGE due to potency, no clue for AST or WHM) you can refresh the DoT at 15s if you really need to move or weave more than 1 oGCD and not have it be an overall DPS loss, but that's something you want to avoid, and hardly a reason to keep them around.

Why don't the DoTs do anything on any healers? Thundercloud is interesting to play with on Black Mage, and even though the changes to its duration and Sharpcast charges in EW have made it fairly easy to work with in EW comparative to how much more difficult it was in ShB, there's still interaction and thought into how BLM interacts with its DoT. Coincidentally, BLM is also the only job left in the game with a casted DoT - something that healers used to have as well.
Even for as much as I love and want SCH to go back to being a DoT mage, SCH doesn't even really lose much if it were to lose Biolysis. It does nothing unique. It interacts with nothing. SCH's DoT in PVP is more interesting than its DoT has been in the entirety of ShB or EW thus far, because at least that has an interaction with Deployment Tactics. This is the case for all healer DoTs, they don't do anything.

I want SCH to go back to having its kit interact with its DoTs. Bane spreading DoTs, having Miasma and Bio be apart of your ST and AoE rotations, etc; that stuff is fun and a lot of what people miss and enjoyed about SCH. I honestly cannot imagine people would be sad to see Eukrasian Dosis, Dia or Combust be replaced with something more interesting and unique to those healers - that's what I would prefer, all four healers having unique DPS downtime kits that make them feel unique and varied to play, and fun to swap around on when you want something different. I don't want to rip their DoTs out and replace them with nothing, I just see very little justification for why they exist at all in their current state. Healer DoTs are boring.

[MagiusNecros]

It's not, it's more like 10-20% of their total damage

Why even have them then? It would be better if they frontloaded the DoT potency into their main attack or into their big nuke. I would have thought that having a DoT on a class starved from doing a lot of damage would be contributing a decent amount?

[baklava151]

BRD has two DoTs but a separate ability that can refresh them both at once (Iron Jaws) and I think they have a chance of procing its oGCD shots during one of its songs.

True in ShB, changed in EW for each song to have a static 80% chance to proc independent of DoTs (rip), so now they're just kinda there. I agree with the rest of the post though, a lot of the DoTs in this game are bland. I'd say Thunder on BLM and Demolish on MNK are two of the more interesting ones, Thunder for its additional effect and Demolish because it's on a shorter timer, plus you have to juggle that with Twin Snakes which has a different timer, making it one of the more engaging aspects of MNK's gameplay to me. PLD and DRG have some decision-making with when to apply theirs since they come from alternate combo finishers. Other than that, yeah the rest of the DoTs I can think of don't really have a huge impact on a job's gameplay. Salted Earth and Slipstream I would say you have to consider when and where to place them so that the boss is in them for their whole duration, but with how big hitboxes have been that aspect is practically non-existent.

[Videra]

Healer DoT is effectively 30%-50% of their overall damage no? Seems like a pretty bad change to make and frontloading all the DoTs onto Scholar will make it more desired for being the big damage healer.

Healers in my experience say it's bad enough they only have 1 or 2 attack buttons to press.

It is bad enough, and I think I might actually just give up if they remove the only reason I have to even look at the screen in some fights. Please don't encourage them to make playing healers even worse.

[Aluja89]

No point in asking for a DOT caster since it doesn't fit into their 2min burst window "vision", hence the reason why PLD is getting a rework next patch even.

Funny how they're screwing the game up so much in order to balance things easier but all their efforts have only made it worse. We're now losing any type of playstyles, flexibility, any semblance of balance and most of all identity.

[MagiusNecros]

No point in asking for a DOT caster

I guess the community needs to scream daily for a DoT caster then. It works for Warriors.

I guess for having fun gameplay you really only have PvP and BLU.

[OgruMogru]

Gimme a mashup of Relm from ff6 and puppetmaster. You have a little puppet/dummy focus that you "sketch" onto that then becomes a copy of the enemy you target. It won't move but you can use your puppet strings to reposition it and keep it close to you so you can keep damaging it. Maybe a keen artists eye means you can copy things like raidbuff effects too? and it stores up damage you do it and you can then choose to detonate it [like a xenoglossy charge] for a big spike of damage at a convenient time[like every 2 minutes cough] Maybe for extra chaos you can pump it full of potential damage and instead of detonating it yourself you can make it targettable and a lucky party member can pop it and claim the damage as theirs. No need to worry about downtime if the puppetmaster can prepo their mammet for the disengaging melee or the blm in narnia and let them POP IT and do a big chunk of damage. Also what's more appropriate for a puppetmaster than having something so deliciously incentivizing. Or I can get my revenge for being made to move as blm and continuously yank it away from melees like a dollar on a fishing line.

weapon is a conductors wand - conductor would be a cute job name too