A question: What makes a Healer "easy/simple" or "hard/complex"?

[ty_taurus]

What makes healer easy? Its simple really. We have too many healing tools that the game doesn't make use of and lack of interactions with them all. Someone already pointed out AST, but I'm going to use it since I know the class so well.

Collective Unconciousness (CU), Celestial Opposition (CO), Earthly Star (ES) and I'll even put Horoscope here are all on a 60 cooldown with raidwides (both in dungeons, raids, and EX) coming in at AROUND the 60 mark. That means I usually have 3-4 heals up every raidwide and can usually use the same one for the same mechanic - there fore, its boring.

You inspired an interesting idea... What if instead of Horoscope being a reactivated heal... the effect changes depending on which tool you activate it with. Even if it were something simple like, if you activate it with a regen heal, it increases magic defense by 10%, and if you activate it with a flat heal, it increases physical defense by 10%. In practice, it can be a lot more specific--even tool specific, but that's just a very simplistic example to communicate the idea. You could have Horoscope have a shorter cooldown, but other heals have longer ones, so you'll often have Horoscope to pair with heal mechanics, but you have to plan out your tools to better take advantage of the secondary effect.

[ASkellington]

You inspired an interesting idea... What if instead of Horoscope being a reactivated heal... the effect changes depending on which tool you activate it with. Even if it were something simple like, if you activate it with a regen heal, it increases magic defense by 10%, and if you activate it with a flat heal, it increases physical defense by 10%. In practice, it can be a lot more specific--even tool specific, but that's just a very simplistic example to communicate the idea. You could have Horoscope have a shorter cooldown, but other heals have longer ones, so you'll often have Horoscope to pair with heal mechanics, but you have to plan out your tools to better take advantage of the secondary effect.

Honestly, Horoscope is fine as it is. Its an okish heal by itself but becomes better and lasts longer if you cast Helios, either one. If you removed 2 of my other oGCDs, it'd be fine as is. Having so many secondary effects... no. Then it makes it bloated. Now if Nocturnal Sect was back and a stance dance where in Diurnal it did something and Nocturnal did something different sure.

Tl:dr if there was one more skill that worked with it, sure. Considering all the inputs that could work with it (ie. Exaltation and CI for example) I think we would have the same problem with Horoscope as I do with AST's current kit. Only instead of pressing 1 button I'd be pressing two. I want AOE mitigation? Horoscope + Exalt. I want AOE shields? Horoscope + CI. I guess if you really wanted to make it work it would need to be a longer cool down, not a shorter one. Kinda like Synastry is. Unless you propose the other skills would be on a longer CD.

[ty_taurus]

Honestly, Horoscope is fine as it is. Its an okish heal by itself but becomes better and lasts longer if you cast Helios, either one. If you removed 2 of my other oGCDs, it'd be fine as is. Having so many secondary effects... no. Then it makes it bloated. Now if Nocturnal Sect was back and a stance dance where in Diurnal it did something and Nocturnal did something different sure.

Tl:dr if there was one more skill that worked with it, sure. Considering all the inputs that could work with it (ie. Exaltation and CI for example) I think we would have the same problem with Horoscope as I do with AST's current kit. Only instead of pressing 1 button I'd be pressing two. I want AOE mitigation? Horoscope + Exalt. I want AOE shields? Horoscope + CI. I guess if you really wanted to make it work it would need to be a longer cool down, not a shorter one. Kinda like Synastry is. Unless you propose the other skills would be on a longer CD.

I didn't necessarily mean a different effect for every other heal, but rather you could connect the effect to a few specific heals, or even your card effects. And I used Horoscope as the baseline for thematic reasons. Reading the party's fortune feels like it should have some type of varying effect rather than something that's always the same.

[ASkellington]

I didn't necessarily mean a different effect for every other heal, but rather you could connect the effect to a few specific heals, or even your card effects. And I used Horoscope as the baseline for thematic reasons. Reading the party's fortune feels like it should have some type of varying effect rather than something that's always the same.

I'm not against the idea if done well (except NO to cards tying into it; as much as I would love that I cannot see that being done well at all by this dev team), but that would mean an overhaul to all of AST's heals to cut the fat (which, I'm not against but - dev team are they willing to do it? I don't think so).

Its why I wanted Noct Sect to come back because it could do that. Remove Neutral, and the Mitigation on CU in Diurnal, and Noct could do the extra interconnectivity - CI (if we want to keep it I wouldn't be sad if we lost it) could be its regen effect, CU in Noct would have the Mitigation only while Diurnal would have the Regen, Exalt could have a new effect under Noct, CO would have its shields.... and maybe Macrocosmos could stay as it is.

But something like that with AST's kit? I'm down. I'd love it honestly.