Healers, then and now:

[Renathras]

I won't speak for Semirhage but I do want to point out Aero 1,2,3 were all available for WHM during Heavensward. There was also the interaction between Cleric Stance and Assize that determined how potent the skill was in terms of healing/damage as well. Minor things to be sure but still an improvement to ARR.

One of the reasons I'm using SB is it's data I can actually FIND. HW I vaguely remember...but it's been a while and I was in the military at the time so had a lot less time to theorycraft (and remember everything from the time anyway). Though I'm again confused how DoTs "enable choice". As I've said, you're either refreshing them within 3 sec of their duration or you're doing it wrong UNLESS the boss is about to die or become untargetable, in which case refreshing them is doing it wrong. Where is the "choice"?

One could argue (as ForsakenRoe has) that it's still skill ceiling/expression (I disagree, but that's at least a debatable point), but I fail to see how it's a CHOICE expression, unless choosing to do it wrong is somehow a valid choice for optimization purposes somehow?

I'm not meaning to be snarky, I just don't think "choice" is the correct term here.

To show what I mean: Contrast New PLD.

A Holy Spirit is 30 less potency than an Atonement, but provides a 400 (Tank) potency heal and allows for more disengage. Obviously, using too many will screw with your MP, but an occasional second HS/non-Divine Might HS in place of an Atonement is actually viable. The difference in DPS is negligible, and if that 400 potency means a Healer could use another damage GCD, would potentially be a party DPS gain. Now this is an interesting choice. An ability that is very flexible in use that can allow to trade a small amount of damage for extra utility in the form of either positioning and/or sustain allowing an additional Healer DPS spell in some circumstances.

A LESS interesting example that's still a choice would be a WHM casting 4x Glare vs 3x Lily + Misery. The two are damage neutral, meaning the player can choose between them. Now, this isn't as interesting a choice since there's literally no reason to do the 4 Glares (even if you aren't using the Solace/Rapture Healing OR putting Misery under buffs, the Lily option is still saving you 1600 MP, not to mention the mobility), you CAN choose between them without any detriment if you aren't going OOM, which we almost never are since Glare is still pretty cheap and Lucid pretty powerful for what it is. It's not an INTERESTING choice (unlike the PLD case which is a "not quite equal but close enough that the utility could be argued to be preferable), but it is A choice where both options are valid.

Contrast DoTs. There is a right way and a wrong way. That's it. If you don't reapply the DoT and the boss stays on the field, your "choice" is objectively wrong. You're doing less DPS and not saving anything or making anything up by doing so. Unlike the Lily choice (where you're saving MP and providing party healing and possible damage buffed Misery) or the PLD choice (where you're sacrificing a bit of damage for some more sustain and mobility/positioning/disengage), letting your DoT fall off is getting you nothing. There's no trade-off where there are cases it could be the better option in a static boss fight. Indeed, the only time it IS the better option flips the coin over to the other side - the boss about to die or be untargetable? Well, now, REAPPLYING the DoT is the wrong choice. There's no trade-off for having done so. What did you gain by doing so? Not healing, not MP, not any utility. In the case of WHM, you can use it as a poor man's Ruin 2 (the up front damage means you can use it for movement; it's a DPS loss if you have a Lily to use instead, but it's a DPS gain over doing nothing in the case you don't have Swiftcast+Glare or a Lily up - its actually the ONLY Healer DoT that has the up front damage and CAN be argued to very rarely be a DPS gain to spam [briefly]). That is, there's no "Trade off" where you're losing something but gaining something (PLD case) or where you're not gaining anything but you're not really losing anything/anything meaningful (4x Glares instead of Lilies; you're technically losing 1600 MP, but that's not hyper-significant, so it's an ALLOWED choice, even if it's a BAD choice - it's inefficient, but not a LOSS in terms of DPS/etc)

...but having your DoT fall off and not refreshing it has no such trade. It's just the wrong option. Unless the boss is going untargetable/dying, in which case REFRESHING the DoT has no such trade. It's just the wrong option.

Get what I'm trying to say?

For a choice to be a choice, it has to be something that either (a) isn't a loss to do or (b) is a trade, losing some thing here to gain something there that MIGHT credibly be argued is equal or slightly greater in some situations.

DoTs - at least standard Healer DoTs - don't do this. The only one that AT ALL does this is Dia if you're using it as a spam movement tool. But that's not even that common. The only time you might do this right now is 4 man pulls (once you Dia all the first pack but aren't to the second pack yet and have already Regen'd the Tank and have no Lilies, you can spam Dia a few more times as you're still walking as you're still getting a slight DPS gain from the chip damage by doing so; again, ONLY Dia works this way of the Healer DoTs, and it's a pretty marginal gain). When it comes to a standard boss...

Well, I'm beating a dead horse/restating myself.

Hopefully somewhere in there I managed to explain what I mean well ENOUGH.

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...

I thought I'd been clear, but perhaps not.

Let me try to say it this way...

I feel the focus of Healers should be healing and support (mainly buffing/debuffing) as a general rule and don't enjoy complex DPS rotations. WHM's current DPS rotation is acceptable to me. I'd rather it not have a DoT because I find DoTs both boring, annoying, and horribly uninteresting unless they do SOMETHING other than "refresh on duration", but it's acceptable. I just don't want MORE of it and feel this has been the level of DPS buy-in of WHM since ARR, and definitely since SB, so I don't think that's asking a lot.

That is, I don't mind simple damage rotations - on par with what WHM already has - on Healers. I just don't desire anything more complex. I don't mind SOME Healers having more complex rotations (as I've noted before) as long as not all of them do, and I don't mean "how about a complex buffing rotation instead?" I wouldn't find a SMN level rotation too terrible if the Healer was specifically designed for it (SGE with Kardia; I've pitched this idea several times), but WHM is not, and so shouldn't be.

The problem with buff gameplay is that FFXIV isn't well built for it. The combat system is too rigid. I mean, this is a combat system where old Arrow had to be changed because giving players a Haste buff was, for most Jobs, either almost not beneficial at all, or for a few, actively detrimental. Where any other game would have haste buffs universally (or nearly universally) a damage buff, in FFXIV, it could actually be a DEBUFF. This leads to really narrow options for utility and buffing, unfortunately. And the high paced combat style doesn't work well with things like camps and party buffs that you'd get from old school MMOs, which is honestly probably why they removed Protect and Stoneskin (the one you could actually cast on people not in your party)

I get what you're going for, but if it was me, I wouldn't make some contingent "activate" spell. They should just be buffs, and they should be GCDs, if that's what you're trying to make.

But that's in a general sense.

If you're talking just AST, as I said, it's the Healer I'll never play outside of hyper-casual tinkering around (I've healed Experts and current 24 mans with it and I like to know how all Healers work so I can work with whoever I get paired with in roulettes or PF, but I probably won't do much else), so I have no strong opinions since it's not a Job I'll main unless I have legitimately no alternative.

...and if such was the case, your idea there is pretty "complex". So I wouldn't be a fan of it, honestly. Seems too burst focused as well (something I don't like at the best of times anyway). That is, it's JUST about everything I'd hate in a Job other than having a DoT. Except it also would have a DoT anyway. XD

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Nah, I like WHM and will probably keep playing it. I like SCH from time to time, and SGE is alright when I want to think a little less, I guess...but WHM is the Job I started with, it's been more or less the same all these years, and I like it now as much as I liked it back when Syrcus Tower was released (2.3 when I started playing). And I loved it then, as it was then, too. Loved it then, and I love it now. It's still fun to me after all these years, and it has (as I've demonstrated) APPROXIMATELY the same general playstyle it's had since SB. Just better (seriously, SB WHM really sucked due to the Lilies being AWFUL; EW's is just as GCD active and more flexible.)

But none of that was the point of this thread.

The point of this thread was more to look back at WHM, SCH, and AST and see how they, today, compare to their historic versions going back as far as I can find good data for, which is SB. Considering with the ShB changes, many people complained and said they wanted SB back, and most people think SB (not HW) was the height of Healing (and arguably Tanking and possibly DPSing) in the game, it seems the most logical place to compare against.

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The short versions are:

WHM today is roughly equal in complexity and slightly greater in flexibility and meaningful choice than SB (shares the Healer overpowered oGCDs and the 2 min burst issues of the present game as detriments afflicting all Healers and, indeed, all JOBS; but actually does a lot of healing with GCD Lily abilities which replace its extra DoT casts in SB)

SCH today is SIGNIFICANTLY nerfed in terms of main rotation, with 2.5-6 (or more) "dead/empty" GCDs that now must be filled with Broil, and worse, without Ruin 2/Miasma 2 for weaving breaking it up, that's even more Broils since you no longer need to use a non-Broil ability to weave oGCDs. This has led to SCH actually being the most Glarespam of the Healers, not WHM. It seems like it definitely needs some of its SB kit back, but the biggest change actually seems not to be the Miasma 1 removal, but rather that Broil is now not 2.5 sec cast, meaning less Ruin 2s (Miasma 2s when close to the boss) to break up the Broilspam.

AST today...actually has the exact same DPS kit as it did in SB. But its Card have been gutted to hell and back, and it traded some more interesting oGCDs (Time Dilation and Celestial Opposition as an AOE Time Dilation) for several oGCDs that are more or less clones of WHM (or SCH/SGE) abilities (Divination vs Plenary, Celestial Opposition is now Assize without damage, Neutral Sect is Holos I guess...etc). In other words, it did what New PLD did. (I've described Tanks as that they were a three sided pyramid and now they're a triangle with WAR, DRK, and GNB being the points and PLD just being a dot in the very center; AST is now this for the Healers)

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Collectively, this indicates the focus of Healer Job changes right now need to be on ASTs having...SOMETHING to make up for all they lost out of their kit that gave them a reason for not having anything other than Malific, and SCH having either Broil go back to 2.5 sec CD and probably re-add Misama or...well, SOMETHING that would give SCH a reason to use Ruin 2 more and/or something else to break up the Broilspam.

WHM, on the other hand, is oddly complete by comparison; its SB incarnation with the major issues it had at the time (MP economy, competitive damage with the other Healers, and a viable GCD healing model) all fixed.

My normal "4 Healers" pitch aside, I think what I explained above about the three Jobs leaves no doubt that SCH and AST both need some serious looking at (even if you disagree with me on WHM, I think it's undeniable the other two need serious help in terms of kit/gameplay)

[Rilifane]

Why is something that doesn't automatically neatly align considered "clunk"?
My counterargument against "if it doesn't neatly align, it's clunk" is that something has a much higher risk of becoming stale the more strict, predictable and neatly aligned it is by nature. Look at how stale the 2min burst meta became: everything was stuffed into "press a few buttons every 30s, some more every 60s and ALL THE BUTTONS every 120s". And I also partly blame this obsession with making everything auto-align for the incredibly stale and boring gameplay in FFXIV.
Something isn't automatically aligned with the Dragon Sight the DRG gave me? Away with it! Someone doesn't burst during my Divination? Align it! My potion either aligns with raid buffs or my personal? Ew! My dot refresh doesn't automatically align with an oGCD I have to press on cooldown? No, can't have that.
You map out the first 2min of a fight, you loop it until the boss dies.
At this point it's not just the devs restricting the gameplay anymore, it's the players as well.

And as for tracking dots: you can split the target bar into HP bar, cast bar and debuff bar and filter the latter to only show your own debuffs, scale it to whatever size is comfortable for you and put it where you want it to be without having to pin it to a massive boss HP bar. I've put mine where my buffs are right above my hotbars so I can track my buffs, debuffs and cooldowns all at once.
Tracking dots on a single target is fairly easy in this game, multi-target is a nightmare though.

[Sebazy]

Seems a strange choice to pick SB for such an in-depth dive as this TBH? Stormblood set the tone even if they did have to walk it back a bit. ShB and EW followed the same trend.

HW seemingly ended on a very different development direction compared to how it started, I guess in reaction to how the average player took difficultly spikes seen in the likes of ThordanEX and Gordias.

As far as WHM itself goes. Yeah for sure, WHM is the best it's ever been in terms of relevance. I don't think anyone with any sense is going to deny that? I can think of 2 times in past expansions where WHM was a must pick for Savage (Gordias and Deltascape), on both occasions it wasn't because WHM was a powerhouse, but rather it was because one of the alternatives was just plain bad (AST for Gordias prog was a struggle right from A1S, SCH wasn't as bad but it still fell noticeably behind Noct AST in 4.0).

Even so, it's still not perfect. It's too mindless to play below Savage. For sure part of it is a content design problem, but job design has to take a part of the blame as well. Taking away healer utility from ARR and HW was an awful decision.

WHM, on the other hand, is oddly complete by comparison; its SB incarnation with the major issues it had at the time (MP economy, competitive damage with the other Healers, and a viable GCD healing model) all fixed.

Just a small correction, WHM absolutely did not have MP issues in SB, SCH was the one having problems there surprisingly due to crazy inflated shield MP costs if I remember right? Thin Air did absolute wonders for the job right out of the gate and was arguably the most impactful ability of the expansion (It was the reason I didn't agree with the doom and gloom the forums had for WHM leading into 4.0). Remember that WHM was competitive for Deltascape, it just fell behind once SCH was fixed for the simple reason that it's healing throughput was GCD focused with no return like we have now meaning that it's DPS contribution fell off a cliff once it had to heal. If you dropped the current EW Lily/Misery system onto SB WHM, it would have been highly competitive.

[Tint]

Though I'm again confused how DoTs "enable choice". As I've said, you're either refreshing them within 3 sec of their duration or you're doing it wrong UNLESS the boss is about to die or become untargetable, in which case refreshing them is doing it wrong. Where is the "choice"?

Well "choice" is maybe not the correct word, but having Aero 1 added dephts to the dps kit of WHM in HW.

Aero 1 was an instant-cast, unlike Aero 2 and Aero 3 which had to be hard casted. And it was a dps-loss over casting Stone 3.

So you were not refreshing Aero 1 when it was falling off, because you would lose dps. But you could use it as a movement tool, because it was instant. But you could not spam it while moving, because overwriting a DoT over and over again has no purpose. And, since the Stone casts back then were as long as the GCD, you also could use Aero 1 for weaving to avoid clipping.

[Payadopa]

Why is something that doesn't automatically neatly align considered "clunk"?
My counterargument against "if it doesn't neatly align, it's clunk" is that something has a much higher risk of becoming stale the more strict, predictable and neatly aligned it is by nature. Look at how stale the 2min burst meta became: everything was stuffed into "press a few buttons every 30s, some more every 60s and ALL THE BUTTONS every 120s". And I also partly blame this obsession with making everything auto-align for the incredibly stale and boring gameplay in FFXIV.
Something isn't automatically aligned with the Dragon Sight the DRG gave me? Away with it! Someone doesn't burst during my Divination? Align it! My potion either aligns with raid buffs or my personal? Ew! My dot refresh doesn't automatically align with an oGCD I have to press on cooldown? No, can't have that.
You map out the first 2min of a fight, you loop it until the boss dies.
At this point it's not just the devs restricting the gameplay anymore, it's the players as well.

And as for tracking dots: you can split the target bar into HP bar, cast bar and debuff bar and filter the latter to only show your own debuffs, scale it to whatever size is comfortable for you and put it where you want it to be without having to pin it to a massive boss HP bar. I've put mine where my buffs are right above my hotbars so I can track my buffs, debuffs and cooldowns all at once.
Tracking dots on a single target is fairly easy in this game, multi-target is a nightmare though.

Pretty much. But I guess we need another expansion where every job plays almost identical until people see it. lol

[Renathras]

Seems a strange choice to pick SB for such an in-depth dive as this TBH? Stormblood set the tone even if they did have to walk it back a bit. ShB and EW followed the same trend.

No, SB is the most logical point. I'll read through some of the rest of these later, but here's the reasoning:

1) The most available data is for SB. It's when the game started hitting it big but before the "dumbing down" of ShB.

2) SB is the cementing of the modern era of the game's design. HW had things like Cleric and encounters with things like the Gorilla to push the bombs, things that no longer exist in the modern encounter design. PARTICULARLY for Healers because it's the point where Cleric no longer existed, which ushered in the modern concept of playing a Healer in FFXIV.

3) Modern raid/encounter cadence, gearing systems, materia systems (for the most part), etc were all cemented in SB. HW still had Elemental Resist and level-up stat point allocation.

4) The modern damage profiles date to SB (HW Tanks did less damage than Healers, not more)

5) The modern Job mechanics/gauges started for most Jobs in SB.

6) Most Jobs that exist or had major additions date to SB (or later). The HW trio have all had redesigns since then, some several times, for example, while SAM/RDM and on have stayed MOSTLY the same.

7) SB was lauded (during ShB) as the height of Job and encounter design, that ShB was seen as having fallen from.

8) SB was when the game really opened up to where a majority of players were likely challenging harder content like Extremes, the 24 mans were also more challenging (launch TG Cid, anyone?), and Savage was done by at least a quarter of the playerbase, something not true by most accounts in HW.

9) Most Jobs resemble their SB forms even now, and even after reworks (excepting the most extensive like MCH and SMN); HW still had things like damage-less gap closers, bow mages, type damage buffs/debuffs (e.g. blunt damage resist down on bosses) and so on.

10) Finally, because people on this forum like to talk about how great SCH and AST were in SB (and WHM when I'm not there to remind them how much it did not), so it seemed worth it to take off the rose tinted goggles and look at that point with clear vision. On some points, they are very clearly right (SCH in particular), so it seemed the most logical point of reference for this reason as well.

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In short, SB is the most logical place to use as the baseline. If you really go back and look through the old skills (Mr Happy's doing a series on just taht), MOST Jobs had some pretty different mechanics in ARR and HW, to the point SB+ can almost be considered "A Realm Reborn, Reborn".

[ForsakenRoe]

Ren stuff

DOTs and skillcaps

Not my fault SE is allergic to fight design that extends beyond 'one boss model in a circular room'. It's hard to see how DOTs can have massive skillcap, when the fight design is more on-rails than a Thomas The Tank Engine playset and there's only ever one target to hit. Debuff tracking definitely needs work though, holy hell. Can we get an update that puts very specific debuffs on the 'emnity list' or whatever it's called, the list where you can see the blue/yellow/orange/red icons to show if you're losing aggro? So eg it'd show a WHM only Dia atm, or an AST only Combust. It wouldn't have to show, eg, a GNB Sonic Break OR Bow Shock, as they're not 'keep this up 100% of the time' type skills. You don't need to look at the lists and see 'ah this mob lost Circle of Scorn', because the timing of 'when you will use COS again' is not decided by 'it fell off', but by 'it came off CD'

Oh yeh, and RPR's stupid 10% buff, that'd be nice to have tracking for too

Are DoTs no longer snapshotted? If not, then I guess they don't, it just makes things smooth and not feel like you're fighting pointless clunk. Does Iron Jaws reapply DoTs or does it extend their duration (e.g. letting you ride a Snapshot high)?

Either way, it's nicer when things break into 15/30/60/120/180 sec divisions. 18 just "feels" too short.

The problem with it being TOO short is you have to worry about people fighting refreshing their DoT or healing a critical person, which is something the Healer rotations are designed to AVOID. The Devs really don't want a "choose to damage or heal" dynamic. They want a "you're a healer first, DPS when no healing is needed" dynamic. I know some PLAYERS don't want that, but the design goal is that.

If a healer player decides to refresh their DOT instead of healing the person who needs healing, and that leads to that person dying, then that healer player made the wrong decision. Which comes back to the same thing as whether it's 'skillcap' or not to refresh the dot when it falls off. Making the decision to delay the refresh to keep the team alive is an expression of skill. Or, making the decision to refresh the dot early, in order to keep it rolling and make time to heal the person, is also a different expression of skill. You're probably not saving anyone in that situation as WHM though, as you're probably GCD locked, unless you happen to have Tetra or Bene spare. But yeh, 'keep party alive' is priority #1. As for IJ, it essentially looks for which DOTs are up, removes them and then on the next game frame, applies a new copy of whichever were 'removed'. So if you IJ in raidbuffs, then 20s later you IJ outside of raidbuffs, you 'un-snapshot' the raidbuffs and apply a regular copy of the dots.

As for what feels 'short' or not, the issue works the opposite way too. BRD DOTs feel bloody awful to me now that they got bumped up to 45s. 30 was fine, idk why they changed it. Just to keep it aligned with song durations? So you could just turn brain off and think 'ah I refresh song, I refresh DOT'? 18s works fine on MNK, it worked fine on BRD back when Venomous Bite was 18s in HW, it's all about the context. And on WHM, I feel like the shorter the DOT duration, the more 'identity' it is. Well, to a certain limit. It still needs to have some 'over time' effect to be considered 'damage over time' right, so I would say 12 is probably ideal imo. Often enough that the damage feels 'bursty' even as an 'over time effect', but not too long that it loses that feeling and goes into the 'malingering' kind of aesthetic that fits more with SCH. And it divides into 120.

Am I getting dementia or was Venomous Bite 9s duration at one point, like at the end of ARR or something? I have vague recollections of it being super short duration but I can't remember when from...

The problem here is that PoM isn't a party buff. So this would be more like using Fight or Flight then 60 seconds later, using Fight or Flight + Requiescat. Which is just...kinda silly.

Doesn't need to be a party buff for it to be that way. GNB has a mini burst at 1min where it does it's No Mercy thing. Then at 2mins, it does all of that, but also gets to do a bit more because of Bloodfest giving 3 more cartridges. Or the previously mentioned DRK thing where it uses 'some stuff' at 1min, and then 'all the stuff' at 2min. 'The best tank design SE accidentally ever made' 4.1 WAR had Berserk at 1min, IR and Berserk at 2mins.

...'My favorite version of any tank in the game was one of the first recorded instances of 2min meta' is not the realization I was expecting to have today but here we are. Though it didn't completely match 2min meta because all the raidbuffs were staggered out, Trick at 60, Brotherhood at 90, Litany at 180, Dragonsight at 120 etc

I'm not picky about it, I just (a) want Protect back and (b) was using an "upgrade path" like what Shelltron, Raw Intuition, and Heart of Stone do.

Yeh, I'm just trying to think how to make it 'not completely dumpster AST's 60s mit' in effectiveness. Though I imagine SE don't actually think CU should have the mit (it's a holdover from Noct AST). The bubble's annoying to use anyway

Physic into Adlo is a bit weird since they're quite different in both cast time, MP cost, and more specifically, Physic is actually a stronger direct heal than Adlo. The problem is it's still mostly useless. XD Benefic 2 is already close enough of an upgrade to Benefic 1, I'm not sure why they didn't outright do it. Same cast time, 200 MP different but that's really not much (especially on AST), there's really just no reason not to.

Point is, those are different abilities with different use cases. ANY time you would cast a Benefic 1, a Benefic 2 is better. Cure isn't QUITE as interchangeable since the MP gulf is bigger, but you can still make that same relative argument. On the other hand, Medica 2 is a weaker heal that sets up a HoT to tick while having a higher MP cost vs Medica with a slightly lower MP cost and lower overall healing, but somewhat more healing "right now", and useful when the party is spread out too much that a Cure 3 couldn't cover every one.

That is, I get the thought behind it, but they actually DO have different use cases. But the Cure 1/2 and Benefic 1/2 do not.

Look again at the potencies of those skills. Medica is 400p, Medica2 is 250, plus 150p per tick. After one single tick of the regen (which can be at max 2.9s away, with a 2.5s recast time), they're equal. Helios/AspHelios are in the same boat. 400 vs 250+150. Changing them to be 300p, then upgrade to '2' and 'Aspected' versions, which just throws the regen effect on top, would work fine. Then at 84 (85? whenever the trait is), increase the base potency to be 400p on cast. You're still going to try to avoid casting them, as they cost a GCD, but at least this way you're removing a hotbar slot to make room for stuff that's more interesting. Once upon a time Medica 2's tick potency was only 50 (and it lasted 30s), can you believe that? Back then, there WAS a reason to use Med2 and then Med1 spam, but now SE's done did it and the two might as well just get merged.

Also, the thinking for Physick is simple. We currently have 450p Physick, 300p Adlo, 180% shield (so, 540p shield). Rescale it so we now have Physick (450p) upgrade into Adlo (450p), with a shield multiplier of 120%. Bam, still 540p shielding. MP cost is the least of our concerns, since it's a move that opportunity-costs damage to use.

Not opposed to this, though I think the first mission is getting Solace down to a low level. I remember posting an ability mix-up before (just reshuffling), but I put Solace down at either 30 (moving Presence of Mind) or maybe it was 18 (moving Stone 2 - I figured if Stone 2 came in the 30-40 range, it'd feel a little less boring than using it for 36 levels...). I think that Solace really needs to be way earlier to establish the "use Lilies as your first line healing". Getting it before even Cure 2 would firmly establish that and make low level healing "Solace once the Tank's around 50%, Cure 1 as backup healing if you don't have any Lilies", firmly establishing the "GCD cast heals are for backup healing" mentality and getting people used to the Lilies early on, considering how key they are to WHM's rotation later on. Getting a lower level of Misery by (at latest) level 50 would be really nice, even if Solace was the only way to generate it at that level.

Getting Lily stuff earlier would be agreeable to me as well. Even if we just have the current levels as 'this is the point where they increase by 100p, and reach their current power', or 'at this point, the speed of the lily gauge goes from 30s to 20s' traits at those points. So something like (stuff might be scuffed I'm not exactly putting thought into this):

24 - Cure 2 (class list)
30 - Solace (650p), if I got my Lily spender shields, Stoneskin would be here (300p ST)
32 - Divine Seal (class list)
35 - 'Tragedy', mini-Misery (4x Stone 2's damage), upgrades to be 4x current Stone/Glare damage at the same levels as getting new Stone/Glare
38 - Cure 3 (class list)
40 - Rapture (300p), if lily spender shields, Stoneskin II (150p AOE)
45 - Protect and Holy
52 - Lily timer improves from 30s per lily to 20s
58 - Aero 3
62 - You can now store 4 'Blood Lily Nourishments', with Tragedy/Misery costing 3, so you can actually heal without overcapping dear god why is that a thing
72 - Glare/Dia/Banish 'enlightening'
74 - Misery
76 - if my shield lily spenders were in, this would be where they get changed to Afflatus Sanctuary and Bastion, something like 450p ST and 250p AOE respectively. Without them, idk, Nourishment can stack to 5?
85 - Solace 800, Rapture 400

I still would like Lily spender that's a HoT, but maybe later.[/QUOTE]

As previous, I'd rather have one that's a shield, but that'd require SE to acknowledge how bad the pure/barrier split has turned out

When I talked about building and detonating an engine, I meant figuratively. Here's a very light overview of where I'm thinking on AST in this regard. Draw and Play are GCD actions. You can draw up to 3 cards and play them as you hold them. They apply effects like a 5% DPS buff, a 5% crit buff... all simple buffs, but you can only apply each card to one person at a time. Two people cannot have balance, and one person cannot have more than 1 card other than you (for soloing). These effects do not immediately occur once you play the card. Instead, you have another spell that causes all of your cards to activate at once, applying their effects to whom you played them on. You also have your buff window spell that can activate the card on one person and extend the effect to the whole party. Every one of these actions generates a star that will attack an enemy for malefic potency damage when you activate a specific OGCD action on yourself or an ally.

If we change Combust to 15s duration, this would be an interesting loop I think. Every 30s, it'd go Combust, Draw, Play, Play, Play, Detonator, Malefic (if needed to pad for Combust's last tick), Combust, Malefic x 6, repeat. Would be nice to do something about that Malefic x 6 but it is what it is. Though, being able to put multiple nonduplicate cards on players other than yourself could be interesting too. It'd kill the idea that 'you only want X card because it's the best' dead, because you wouldn't just want your SAM to have 'Balance cos it best', you'd want them to have Balance AND Arrow AND Spear AND another one, and you activate them all for the 2min window and all of your dps go bankai. This way you could actually have unique effects again, because 'flat damage on the SAM' isn't the only one worth having, when you could apply 'flat damage, and also crit rate, and also DHit rate, and also 'a portion of the damage dealt is compiled and dealt again at the end of the card's effect'

As for soloing, you could lean into the level 60 quest fight where the guy uses all 6 constellation thingys and stops time (???), so something like 'if you have the effect of all six arcana at once, you go super mode'. IDK what it'd do though, and it'd need to be 'not strong enough to make it better than actually putting buffs on people', which might be a challenge

Seems a strange choice to pick SB for such an in-depth dive as this TBH? Stormblood set the tone even if they did have to walk it back a bit. ShB and EW followed the same trend.

IDK Ren's reason for using SB as a basis for this thread, maybe just cos that's the one that has more readily accessible data, potencies, etc kept in available locations on the internet. As for my reasoning (and probably others), SB was the 'middle ground'. I know SE has said 'we aren't going back to 3.0 design', I accept that. There's stuff about 3.0 that was not good. Dissipation eating your fairy and not giving it back, Cleric Stance locking you out of actually being able to heal, That god awful animation lock on Bio that meant you'd Bio, Bane and spread 'sorry nothing' because the debuff hadn't applied yet, same with Deploy and Adlo, there was a lot of things about HW that were not good. Yeh some are engine stuff rather than design stuff, but there's some stuff that was just, not good design either. Cleric is the perfect example of it I think. Some players might want to go back to the days where if a newbie screwed up their Cleric Stance swap timings, it'd lock them out of healing, kill their party, and they'd never risk Cleric'ing again because of the experience. I don't. I learned how to do it, but it's too punishing and too clunky a system to learn for a new player, and is the kind of thing that would turn off newer players from the role. SB removed that clunk, but still had some stuff to keep us engaged, like SCH still had more than one DOT, AST had Royal Road, etc. The only way I'd want Cleric Stance back, as the 'stance dance' form, is as a mechanic a job is designed around. Like if SCH had 'tactics' to swap between, or if AST could swap Sects mid combat.

If we were going to get a 'compromise' with SE on what healers should look like going forward, I'd argue that Stormblood is the model for the DPS side of things to base them on, not HW. I don't know if we have room for SCH's lost SB stuff to come back, on top of the SHB and EW stuff we now have, though, it's kinda struggling on hotbar space. Unless we combine stuff, like Physick into Adlo, Lustrate into Excog (yeh Excog with a 1s CD I said it), maybe remove Emergency Tactics and just rebalance Succor to be more upfront heal, less % multiplier for the shield (so the overall shielding is still the same as now)

Well "choice" is maybe not the correct word, but having Aero 1 added dephts to the dps kit of WHM in HW.

Aero 1 was an instant-cast, unlike Aero 2 and Aero 3 which had to be hard casted. And it was a dps-loss over casting Stone 3.

So you were not refreshing Aero 1 when it was falling off, because you would lose dps. But you could use it as a movement tool, because it was instant. But you could not spam it while moving, because overwriting a DoT over and over again has no purpose. And, since the Stone casts back then were as long as the GCD, you also could use Aero 1 for weaving to avoid clipping.

AST was the same, Malefic 2 was equal potency to Aero (crossclassable, both 200p), so you could use Aero for movement, not upkeep for damage

Pretty much. But I guess we need another expansion where every job plays almost identical until people see it. lol

Issue is, there's some bad actors who will just outright refuse to see the issues for whatever reason. 'I'm having fun so whatever problem you have doesn't actually matter' kind of thing. We've had DRK/WAR 'lol same job' memes for long enough that people assumed PLD's rework was going to be WAR 3, and while it... kinda wasn't? It doesn't change the fact that DRK and WAR are alarmingly similar still.

edit:

9) Most Jobs resemble their SB forms even now, and even after reworks (excepting the most extensive like MCH and SMN); HW still had things like damage-less gap closers, bow mages, type damage buffs/debuffs (e.g. blunt damage resist down on bosses) and so on.

The other stuff, agreed, but this one stands out. All the weird stuff like Blunt Arrow (BRD silence with 50p attached, so it was never up when it was needed cos 'haha i used for damage sry'), don't miss that. But anyway, the type damage buff thing was still in SB. The 'X Down' debuffs were removed going from HW to SB, so Delerium (well, that was reworked anyway), Dragon Kick's INT down, Rage of Halone's STR down, that stuff. MNK was 'not a great choice' tier because the NIN DRG BRD MCH/SMN dream team was still in effect, due to the Piercing debuff.

You wanna know how I'd have solved the issue? MNK changed from Blunt, to Piercing. 'Your punches and kicks are fast enough to be considered as piercing a strike as a spear or arrow' is very Monk fantasy I think. How did that one escape SE's design team I'll never understand


But yeh, think about it. What pre SB job HASN'T been reworked?

PLD - 6.3
WAR - 2.1, 4.2
DRK - 5.0
MNK - started in 5.4, finished in 6.0
NIN - small rework to mudras in 5.1 to GCD them, 6.2 mug/TA changes
DRG - coming in 7.0
BRD - bowmage'd in 3.0, un-bowmage'd in 4.0
MCH - Edgar'd in 5.0
SMN - 6.0
WHM - 5.0 Lily fixes
SCH - 5.0 'remove every DOT'
AST - lmao

Looks like only BLM survived all these years. Surely a coincidence, huh

[Tint]

Looks like only BLM survived all these years. Surely a coincidence, huh

BLM got major adjustments with SB launch. Before that Enochian timer was refreshed with Blizzard 4 casts. With SB they tied Enochian to Umbral Ice / Astral Fire, added the Umbral Hearts and reduced the cooldown of Transpose so AF / UI would never fall off.

[ForsakenRoe]

Hmm, I suppose in that regard, the swap in playstyle from 'spam fire, spend firestarter procs' to 'use fire 444 1 444' cycles in 3.0 could be considered too. Idk where others would draw the line on 'what is a rework' vs 'what is an evolution of the job's kit'. Like, would the addition of Heat to MCH in 4.0 be an evolution, or close to a rework with how much an impact it had on the rotation?

[Sparkthor]

In HW the standard BLM rotation was more 4 Fire IV than 6, due to Enochian being link with Blizzard IV, and because at this time, both Fire IV and Blizzard IV were 3s cast time (opposed to 2.8 and 2.5s now).

So SB change a lot of things for the BLM in use, as the standard rotation moved a lot.

I would say it's normal jobs got rework as the game go on as it gains in maturity. But i think the biggest changes is "Healers need to gcd to heal" to "Good healer make few uses of healing gcd", and i'm not sure people would love to go back as using gcd for it. Personnaly I would dislike to.