General Healer Discussion [The Echo Chamber]

[ty_taurus]

I'm jealous of Y'shtola's Water spells. They're so cool and pretty...

After YoshiP's frustration with the healer shortage in that interview, I'm a bit more hopeful that they're starting to realize the problems that ShB's fight design philosophy brought with healer kits having nothing but heals. Who knows, maybe they'll bless us with Aero III+Fluid Aura and Miasma+Bane in the future.

I don't think we'll be getting the elemental spells again, or if we do on WHM, they'll be upgraded. Something I think is long overdue is introducing ability skins where you can choose between different particle effects and animations for different spells. This would obviously be a large undertaking to do this for every spell and ability, but a very simple way to start without adding workload would just be to allow people to choose between which version of abilities that already upgrade they want to use for visual effects, such as choosing Stone 1/2/3/4 or Glare over Glare III. Not every job would benefit from this really, but some WHM players would love to return their holy spells to their elemental equivalents, I know many MCH players would love to go back to more simple gunplay rather than constant acrobatics, and some SCH and SGE players really don't like the SFX of Broil IV and Dosis III respectively. There are other examples as well, but it would also open the door for them to add job reskin concepts to the game, even if only as mogstation items.

For example, a reskin of BLM so that your Ice and Fire spell animations are swapped, meaning you largely use blizzard spells, and your fire spells are your MP restoration tools. They could also add an all-music using Bard who's attacks are from their harp rather than their bow now, or vice versa. There's an NPC in Bozja, Atori Moribe, a Lancer from Nagxia who uses entirely unique versions of DRG abilities that are cherry blossom themed which I think would sell very well if they created a full on Sakura DRG skin. I would love to buy a reskin of SMN's Bahamut that uses Quezacotl from Akadaemia Anyder, a summon from FF8 that I've always loved the design for, and they could also sell reskins of the summons of non-primal entities that were summons in other games, like Diabolos and Siren. Can write it off as you reshaping the aether of your summons based on your memories. Not to mention the Eden versions of the elemental primals. Assuming 7.0 SMN introduces Ramuh, Leviathan, and Shiva in some fashion, I would love to upgrade all of them into their Savage variations. SCH too could have reskins of their faerie for Feo Ul or reskin Seraph as Titania. Perhaps also choosing between the current take of a more technological SCH with Biolysis or using Bio III and Miasma III.

Btw, I know you were a little interested in my SCH ideas a while back. Do you like the concept I came up with?

[ForsakenRoe]

when i first saw nier raids i thought 'man i can imagine them making a nier themed set of skill animations for SCH and selling it on mogstation', but the main reason i would want a system like that is that it'd allow BLU to be a 'real job', with the carnivale and collectathon content as side stuff it can also do. imagine it learns basic skills for it's rotation via questing and levelling (so you know for sure that someone in a max level raid has their full kit), and the 'collect the spells' is to unlock new skins for those spells. after all, what is the difference, outside of carnivale, between flamethrower, aqua breath, ink jet, 'the look', etc? they're all cones, they all do the same damage. so they could make the additional effects be 'showmanship' effects that only apply during carnivale or unsync, and rework problematic spells to have the OP form be 'showmanship' only, such as changing LV5 Death to be a heavy hit for the burst window, and it's instantdeath be unsync only. Hey, this would even allow them to alleviate the glam issue a bit, if we can only instakill things while unsynced, we know for a fact the player is doing 'old content', so them 'instakilling a raidboss' isnt a big deal anymore, allowing them to easily reclaim glam from old raids without having to reclear it in PF.

anyway enough about that, while it is against TOS (and i do not endorse it pls no ban) i have seen certain people have made reskins of skills, some of them look good enough to put in the game and tbh if SE made the system to allow you to unlock 'skill glamours' as it were, i wish they'd cut a deal with these individuals to put it in the game, just because it'd add some variety. we've all seen WHMs throw around twinkly lights for long enough, what if that WHM player could choose to reskin that Glare to something else? it'd be a new level of identity expression, matching your skill glam to your actual glam, etc.

who am i kidding, first thing i'd do is revert toxicon 2 back to toxicon 1, or replace phlegma with tox1 because i dont like the big blue ball

[flowerfairy]

Btw, I know you were a little interested in my SCH ideas a while back. Do you like the concept I came up with?

Cool stuff. I really like the whole idea of SCH switching into stances like Libra, Emergency Tactics, and Eos/Selene. Quiet Dusk is insane but honestly a cool replacement for Fey Wind, I wonder how often it would be used if you're raiding with a BLM.
Do the spells that don't say anything about MP have zero cost to them, like Broil and Adlo? I think the GCD damage spells should be around 400 or a number that makes MP regen a slight positive, while GCD heal spells are around 800. I feel like the abilities chosen to cost MP are a bit arbitrary, like Seraphic Veil is only available if you summoned Seraph on a 180s CD, and it costs MP even though it has a 10s recast. I get the MP cost on Elysium though, that's insane too.
I think Light/Dark Shift should be it's own button, the Summon buttons be their own 2.5s GCD buttons, and tie Blessing/Spark to their respective Summon buttons. I feel it's the kind of situation where button efficiency should be sacrificed for freedom of choice. Also, Shift has a really heavy cooldown. It might be personal preference but I'd like the idea of being able to frequently switch Eos/Selene, so I'd reduce it to 90s CD.

That's all I have to say, everything's really well thought out. It's got busywork that SE probably would never touch with a 10 feet pole but really cool design for SCH.

[ty_taurus]

Cool stuff. I really like the whole idea of SCH switching into stances like Libra, Emergency Tactics, and Eos/Selene. Quiet Dusk is insane but honestly a cool replacement for Fey Wind, I wonder how often it would be used if you're raiding with a BLM.
Do the spells that don't say anything about MP have zero cost to them, like Broil and Adlo? I think the GCD damage spells should be around 400 or a number that makes MP regen a slight positive, while GCD heal spells are around 800. I feel like the abilities chosen to cost MP are a bit arbitrary, like Seraphic Veil is only available if you summoned Seraph on a 180s CD, and it costs MP even though it has a 10s recast. I get the MP cost on Elysium though, that's insane too.
I think Light/Dark Shift should be it's own button, the Summon buttons be their own 2.5s GCD buttons, and tie Blessing/Spark to their respective Summon buttons. I feel it's the kind of situation where button efficiency should be sacrificed for freedom of choice. Also, Shift has a really heavy cooldown. It might be personal preference but I'd like the idea of being able to frequently switch Eos/Selene, so I'd reduce it to 90s CD.

That's all I have to say, everything's really well thought out. It's got busywork that SE probably would never touch with a 10 feet pole but really cool design for SCH.

The idea involves a rework to how MP functions across all healers. I don't really think it makes sense to have your standard tools chip away at MP and be designed to automatically resolve itself with Lucid Dreaming, especially when physical jobs have absolutely no cost other than range for melee. So yes the idea is if an MP cost isn't listed, it costs none.

The idea here instead is MP is a more prominent resource for specific actions, and managing MP so you can continue using those actions becomes a more active component of decision making. It's experimental in these builds and without being able to test it in a game build, there's no real way to know how well it works as I've laid it out, but I think the concept is a much better one than how MP works currently.

As for the busywork aspect, it's also something that could be worked toward. Like if I were a designer for their team, I'd pitch this rough concept as the goal to more toward and then, hoping that got approved, move onto steps A and B to get this as we want it by 8.0, for example. Ultimately it's more about capturing a concept rather than saying "this is how it should be exactly as is written," right? I appreciate the critiques though, there are some good points. I was thinking on MP for Seraph actions is because there's no Fey Gauge cost. You can use them for theoretically the entire 22 seconds if you wanted to with no other restriction, and they generate Aetherflow so they're DPS positive to use so long as you aren't overcapping.

I see what you're saying on the Light/Dark Shift. I think the choice of which faerie you go with should hold more weight which makes me adverse to dropping it to 90 seconds, but if you could manually summon the other faerie on the GCD by just letting Summon Eos and and Summon Selene exist while the other is out, you do have the option to take a small DPS hit to change if you feel you need to swap to the other since I kept the summon on the GCD. And then Light/Dark Shift would be a separate button.