Healers, then and now:

[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.