A summary of healer issues

[ForsakenRoe]

What a disaster

For example, suppose in 7.0 for WHM, they had Afflatus Misery upgrade into Afflatus Purgation, Aquaveil get a reduced CD to 45 seconds, and Assize get a second charge. Those would absolutely be changes, and Purgation would technically be a new ability...but since it just outright replaces Misery, it would not generally be treated as a new thing, and Aquaveil and Assize would not even be seen as new. Heck, WHM could get that thing I suggested before where every 4th Glare cast gave you a double power Holy (or whatever made it a DPS gain over Glare) and people wouldn't see that as a new ability, even though it actually WOULD change WHM's rotation.

One of the four choices for 'new covenant skills' for Warrior in Shadowlands was 'Condemn', which was 'Execute, but you can use it on the first 20% of the boss as well as the last 20%', and replaced Execute on the bar. People loved it. Saying 'oh this new thing wouldnt be treated as a new thing because it replaces the old thing on the bars' is hilariously disingenuous. Should we say that 'SMN stops getting new things for it's GCD rotation at level 62 (ruin 4)'? Everything after that is 'not 'new', its an upgrade to an old thing'. Mad

On a small tangent, I've been working on a different Sage rework concept lately that I'm feeling really happy with if anyone wants to take a look at this document. I'm trying to add as much information as possible to what's different and what the logic is behind certain things with highlighting and footnotes, so I hope it's nice and readable. May turn sharing off in the future if I go back and play with things some more, but I think there's a lot of promise in something like this.

I kinda like it's vibe. It has passing similarities to what I was thinking of (augmenting skills has a bigger focus), but where I seem to have tried to stick with the basic outline of what we currently have (augmenting Dosis in different ways), you've separated the effects out to different attack buttons. This is potentially a good thing, as my version didn't exactly go into depth about how it'd rebalance to factor in things like Ixochole existing. I'm assuming that if something says 'does a line AOE' it doesn't need a target enemy to use, but does do damage to an enemy should they be in that AOE, which means positioning would be an actual factor for once. I'm not sure what I make of the MP restore tool being a GCD, but I guess if you manage your kit right it's damage neutral, is the idea? And the 'bad version' that only does the MP restore is the 'I messed up save me from myself' button?

With Dyskrasia being inspired by Continuation, would you estimate the gameplay and APM of the design to be roughly GNB level speed?

Going into more detail because I have nothing better to do while maintanence is ongoing:

- Eukrasian Diagnosis and Prognosis have some hefty MP costs, while their regular counterparts are zero MP cost. This means that using a Eukrasian version when you don't need the shields would be hella punishing for a more casual player. Would it be possible to consider adjusting the heal/shield ratio so that the shield remains the same, but the heal is equal to the basic version's healing (so eg. E.Diag goes from 300 + 180% to 450 + 120%)? This way the only 'punishment' is the MP cost, rather than 'the MP cost, and you also healed less lmao'

- Not 100% convinced about 'restores more if a barrier is present' for Druo/Ixo, as the main time you'd use them is 'right after an attack blew the barriers off of everyone'. If there were a buff that lingered after a barrier broke to give some leniency that would potentially be interesting (cough), also I'm assuming it means literally any barrier, including ones applied by other jobs

- Soma cool, line AOE means aiming it correctly is important, but unlike POA, it doesn't get super thin close to the SGE so it's less likely someone will miss the effect if they're right up the SGE's backside

- If Toxicon is damage-equivalent to Dosis, and it's followup OGCD also does Dosis damage, doesn't that mean people are just going to do the classic 'use to prevent overcap, dump in raidbuff windows' instead of making use of the mitigative effect?

- Since the buff cap issue was caused by players receiving too many buffs, rather than the enemy getting too many debuffs, I think it's better to keep Phlegma's 'increase damage you deal' buff on the enemy, like how Trick Attack now works for NIN. 5s is kinda low, though, I'm guessing the idea is to go Phlegma, Dyskrasia, something else, Phlegma, Dyskrasia, something, to stagger those two windows of 5s a bit more during raidbuffs. Is the 'something else' intended to be Toxicon because it sure looks like that'd be the go to (or Proto-Pneuma)

- Not sure I'm sold on E.Bia either. You spend 1200 MP to accelerate your Gall generation, so you can convert it to Sting, so you can use that to generate MP without losing damage on the worse regular Anamnesis cast? It seems like you pay MP into a system that will never pay out more than you put in, maybe I'm missing something here, feel free to clarify

- Katarrh is just free damage? Ok fair enough

- Dyskrasia should lose the charges and the recast time should be 1s. If you want to draw inspiration from Continuation, I think you should just commit and go all in on it.

- Wait, the followup to Phlegma is 15s CD, so you can't do the raidbuff window example from earlier? Huh, weird, IDK what to make of this. Phlegma, followup, Toxicon, followup, Phlegma, followup, Toxicon, followup, seems like a fairly obvious raidbuff window thing to have, but if Edema is 15s CD, you'd have to do one Phlegma at the start of the raidbuff window, and one 15s later at the very tailend, and some buffs only last 15s like Battle Litany, so they'd have fallen off by then, clarification pls

- Having ProtoPneuma turn into Pneuma while the former is on CD is a potential issue, as it'd be hard to track whether it's about to come up again. Imagine needing to use the heal, but it suddenly reverts to the damage-only version just as you go to cast it. I get what you're going for though, Pneuma's animation is cool and it's kinda bleh that it only gets used when there's healing to do, so I'd recommend just having Pneuma as a 'do big damage' CD and moving the big healing elsewhere. Maybe attach the big heal to a damage skill with a CD (repurpose Bia maybe) and allow it to be spread to the party via E. Polydipsia? Then maybe E.Bia could be 'apply big shield' and spread that in the same way

- Am I seeing right that only Toxicon and Anamnesis spend Addersting?

Now I've read it again and thought about things a bit, it's interesting for sure, and has potential, but some stuff needs ironing out like potencies and stuff. I'd have to playtest it to find out, but atm I think (?) the potencies and costs means that you'd be forced into using Anamensis (regular) at some points because the MP costs are too high compared to your MP income. OR you'd be forced to use Prognosis spam (by which I mean 'more than one for any given raidwide'). Numbers subject to change etc I know, but the first thing that needs changing imo is that E.Ana's MP refresh potency needs to go up, or the 'augment GCDs' need to go down from 1200

and second thing is to change E.Bia's effect lol

anyway GJ was a fun read