SCH - Faerie Galmour: Discuss!

[AmiableApkallu]

Spicy and wildly off topic take time:

With the way our kits are stacked, I actually think it would be significantly easier to rejig cooldowns, mp costs and potencies on our GCD and oGCD kits to break up the Cure spam in the face of actual serious incoming damage vs the fairly significant task that is turning the glare spam into actual engaging gameplay.

Hammer the potency on our GCDs, raise MP costs for AoE GCDs through the roof to make them unsustainable and combine that with a switch to shorter oGCD cooldowns and a culling of inexplicable fluff like Fey Blessing. Add a little more inter kit synergy within our heals to reward smart usage and IMO that'd make things massively more entertaining.

You've got me curious: What do you mean by "add a little more inter kit synergy within our heals to reward smart usage"? Do you have an example?

[Sebazy]

You've got me curious: What do you mean by "add a little more inter kit synergy within our heals to reward smart usage"? Do you have an example?

I'd absolutely love to see more little interactions and side effects between various aspects of our kit and that could be used to spice up how we heal AoE damage (The mindless ease in which we delete AoEs is the biggest barrier to making healing interesting IMO).

We can take a cooldown like Aquaveil and add an additional effect of it adding a 10y splash radius to the next heal cast on that target. If Medica II is expensive enough to make us think twice about leaning on it, let us use something like Aquaveil to aoe Regen on a target instead. It needs a little setting up and it needs aiming. Both of which are preferable in my eyes to mindlessly pressing 1 button from Narnia to make the bad go away.

TLDR, instead of having bloated kits with a wide variety of moderately long and mostly distinct cooldowns, a switch to more streamlined kits with short CDs that can be used in different combinations to achieve different results would be so much more interesting IMHO.

[Renathras]

Still with this point....

Again I ask, what's the actual problem with it?

I can answer this when you answer the question I asked. Given how readily people "lose their shit" already over minor damage differences, what on earth makes you think they WON'T if you greatly expand the gap on healers? And, as noted above by Fulminating, you cannot beat the enrage checks without healers contributing, so which contribution do they balance enrage checks around at that point? The 1% performer - making the other 99% able to push phases - or the 75% or so performer - meaning large swaths are no longer clearing content and there's a massive healer shortage?

Considering how this community has been at each other's throats over it before (Cleric Stance) AND how people are snippy about small damage percent differences AND how balance will either be allowing phases to be easily pushed OR causing wipes due to enrage (worse fail state) AND that things like "Tales from the Duty Finder": Exist...

...what on earth makes you think people won't lose their poop over this?

.

I also find it odd how people always frame it as "more healing means you'd fail casual content" when that's not at all true. More healing just means casuals would spam Medica more - which I'm told they already do. So nothing would change on the casual side by having more frequent but smaller ticks of healing. I've never understood that argument because it doesn't make sense unless you're talking about making the healing both more frequent AND larger spikes than now, which doesn't make sense as the larger spike part is the problem, so why would we incorporate one of the two parts of the current problem into our solution...?

SCH is the healer I play the least, but I did like Selene over Eos, and since my main gametime is spent on roulettes, it's not like I needed the extra healing anyways. The interrupt was horrendeously slow, but I liked to give out the haste buff, it went with the aesthetic of being a support rather than straight up healer like WHM, and the mass Esuna - as niche as it was - came in handy in situations like Dun Scaith.

Imo Selene could've easily been reworked to be SCH's "cleric stance" but oh well. If we get a Feo Ul glamour, I'd probably play it more often

Ever since HW (with AST stances) I felt that SCH should be able to go pure or barrier stance using the Faeries. Maybe Eos as the pure/direct healer stance (Emergency Tactics all the time) and Selene being the barrier stance. That way, if you got paired with another SCH in DF 8 or 24 mans, you could swap faerie and still be good to go. Even in combining them, they could have combined more of their abilities. I guess they decided AOE Esuna was too OP, though...

Tuning healing requirements high enough to make healers necessary means the healers in the party are no longer allowed to make mistakes,

I don't think this is at all true, though it depends on how you define "mistakes".

Right now, let's say on WHM you blow Afflatus Rapture AND Assize AND Lilybell AND Plenary Indulgence AND Asylum AND Temperance all at once (your cat climbs on your computer chair and then face-plants your face into your keyboard, say). That's 6 mistakes.

...so you cast Cure 3. Then maybe you cast Cure 3 again. Problem has been solved.

I suppose it could also be what you define as "necessary", but in casual content, all that would mean is "damage to the Tank should be greater than their self-sustain + mitigations can control (so they'll be slowly losing health even with perfect play) and for the party as a whole, greater than the Tank + DPS, even the most cure minded DPS (say a party of...DNC and SMN, I guess?) can provide. Look at what the healing of Eternal Flight + Rekindle + Curing Waltz + Dance Partner Curing Waltz collectively does added to the Tank's PARTY healing, all of that filtered through mitigation. Whatever that collectively is, it's probably less than what Medica 2 + Medica 1 spam could heal through.

This would mean there is a large gap between what makes Healers necessary (something 1 Tank + 3 DPSers could not heal through on their own) vs what makes Healers unable to make mistakes - right now, even Savage healing requirements allow Healers to make a lot of mistakes. I could be wrong, but you could PROBABLY heal all Extremes and most (maybe all?) Savages using only GCD cast time MP costing heals. The bigger problem there would be MP efficiency (since the Devs have tuned the content around people not using them). But in terms of HPS needs, your GCD heals can probably carry the party. As long as people aren't outright being one-shot (mitigation), a few Medica/Medica-equivalents from the 2 Healers can quickly top everyone up because their healing potency is very high vs player health pools.

[EDIT2: Gosh, I'm exhausted, but I may try to add up the collective potencies of these things later to see what the MOST healing 1T/3DPS party should be able to do overall (all the others would be less) to see what that number actually is within a 2 min window...and see how that would compare to the Healer tools.]

So there's a low place on the measuring bar where healers are NECESSARY but can make many mistakes and still not wipe the party vs the very very very high notch on the bar (the very top, actually) where healers would have to play flawlessly and heal 100% of the time and optimally use 100% of their kit and that failure to do so would result in a wipe.

On the other hand, non-optimal DPS rotations cause all kinds of problems - again, what are Enrages now based on, the 1% healer or the 99% healer? The 50% healer? The 25% healer? If too low, that means a high performing healer party can push phases and skip mechanics, making fights trivial. If it's based on too high, though, then you get tons of people not able to make Enrage, which means (a) lots of healers quit, causing a massive shortage and/or (b) parties are even MORE pushing for the meta high DPS party so they have that wiggle room in case their healer can't perform, leading to an even more rigid meta.

That a lot worse case than "just drag on for longer", I would think.

I’d just remove the 1-only limitation on phoenix downs, unrestricted their use from combat, give them a 5 minute cooldown but are instant, and award them to players for clearing roulettes. High-End Duties then restrict the use of phoenix downs in combat, and “disable phoenix downs” becomes a DF option like minimum item level or silence echo. It seems silly to me how the most iconic item next to the standard potion is unusable in 95% of circumstances.

100% agreed.

I don't even know why the item exists if you can't ever use it.

As much as I don't expect this to happen, I would love it if Eos Carbuncle looked like this. I'd call it Dawn Carbuncle.

That is legitimately adorable. I want this now.

With the way our kits are stacked, I actually think it would be significantly easier to rejig cooldowns, mp costs and potencies on our GCD and oGCD kits to break up the Cure spam in the face of actual serious incoming damage vs the fairly significant task that is turning the glare spam into actual engaging gameplay.

Hammer the potency on our GCDs, raise MP costs for AoE GCDs through the roof to make them unsustainable and combine that with a switch to shorter oGCD cooldowns and a culling of inexplicable fluff like Fey Blessing. Add a little more inter kit synergy within our heals to reward smart usage and IMO that'd make things massively more entertaining.

Of course, the issue with this approach is how it will effect the casual community in the early endgame. With careful tuning to ensure a sensible progression in difficulty so that things steadily ramp up as you progress through leveling dungeons into Experto > Alliance > Extremes etc it could be done.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. 2.0 ARR did exactly this and SE deserve credit for doing a genuinely brilliant job of it. The level cap dungeons were a legitimate bump up in all regards over the leveling dungeons before and they also offered up an introduction to mechanics that we would later come up against in the hard mode primals which in turn were gatekeepers for BCOB.

I am at this point basically convinced oGCDs are the problem. Too many, too often up, too powerful.

I'm not sure I agree with all of this, but I agree with most of it. WHM healing the level cap dungeons in ARR wasn't at all impossible, and wasn't boring, but was done entirely with GCD heals. All the party had to be smarter, too, since DPSers COULD rip aggro off of Tanks, Tanks had to be mindful of pull sizes, what CDs they had up, how they positioned enemies (not just cleaves, but also the lost art of LOS/line of sighting which is now only barely done in that one hallway after the first boss in The Vault), and how big of pulls the party could actually manage.

I feel like the solution is to always have a fairly efficient backup healing tool that can be semi-spammed (Cure 1 has always been that, and to an extent Medica 1; Cure 3 was the pricey one) while having the bigger and more specialized tools be a tradeoff consideration. "Do I want to cast 3 Medica 1s to do the job, or do I want to cast one Cure 3 to do it all at once and let me get in some more damage, but at the risk that I have to more carefully watch my MP?"

Once upon a time, Freecure DID have a point in existing.

[Sebazy]

I can answer this when you answer the question I asked. Given how readily people "lose their shit" already over minor damage differences, what on earth makes you think they WON'T if you greatly expand the gap on healers? And, as noted above by Fulminating, you cannot beat the enrage checks without healers contributing, so which contribution do they balance enrage checks around at that point? The 1% performer - making the other 99% able to push phases - or the 75% or so performer - meaning large swaths are no longer clearing content and there's a massive healer shortage?

Correction. You can't reliably beat enrage checks in Savage content without healer's contributing. Savage is not the problem here, Dungeons are the problem, Alliances are the problem, Extremes are about the limit of the issue here. Enrage checks are not an issue in the sort of content that's relevant to this dicussion.

Are you honestly trying to suggest that Savage needs to be tuned around the bottom 1% of players?

Considering how this community has been at each other's throats over it before (Cleric Stance) AND how people are snippy about small damage percent differences AND how balance will either be allowing phases to be easily pushed OR causing wipes due to enrage (worse fail state) AND that things like "Tales from the Duty Finder": Exist...

Are we playing the same game here? You do realise that going in on someone over their DPS in game is more likely to get you banned than botting right? About the only time you'll see people actively and DIRECTLY calling each other out is in statics and as an edge case, Savage PF. Aka content where DPS is actually important. In Dungeons and alliances I personally haven't seen anything beyond the VERY occasional over 'dps is slow' comment and even that is rare. The only times I've seen people get grouchy in Extremes is down to mechanics failures rather than DPS mainly because the enrages are so lax that as long as people are staying alive, you've probably got DPS to clear it. Tales of Duty finder has no relevance here. The overwhelming majority know full well not to pressure people on DPS in game where it actually matters because they know they will eat a temp ban for it. Those that don't know, soon learn.

...what on earth makes you think people won't lose their poop over this?

.

SE's proven track record of banning people for calling out overs over their DPS in pug/casual content.

THIS
IS
NOT
WOW.

Stop pretending it is.

I also find it odd how people always frame it as "more healing means you'd fail casual content" when that's not at all true. More healing just means casuals would spam Medica more - which I'm told they already do. So nothing would change on the casual side by having more frequent but smaller ticks of healing. I've never understood that argument because it doesn't make sense unless you're talking about making the healing both more frequent AND larger spikes than now, which doesn't make sense as the larger spike part is the problem, so why would we incorporate one of the two parts of the current problem into our solution...?

Let me let you into a little secret about the logs site. People who know, don't look at DPS to gauge how good someone is. They look at a player's active rate and CPM or casts per minute. The thing that separates the top tier healers from you and I is their ability to keep their GCD rolling through mechanics. Let's take BarbEX's knuckle drum as an example. If you look at your own best log on it, you drop your GCD and don't cast anything for around 40 seconds. You could improve this by hoarding Lily charges and swiftcast prior to the mechanic and if you look for highly ranked logs, that's the sort of thing they will do to fill in this gap.

Now I'm not trying to suggest that you're bad, quite the opposite, your active rate is generally fine. However my concern is with players that have an active rate that's as low as 30% of yours. If you can't maintain your GCD through that mechanic and have a gap in throughput of 40 seconds. How do you think they are going to do?

If the mechanic is doing enough damage to actually require healing to survive. What's going to happen when they aren't able to maintain their healing through it? If they can't press glare, what makes you think they are going to be able to press medica II? These bottom percentile players aren't not DPSing because they don't want to, they aren't DPSing because they can't keep up with the encounter as is and are getting flustered.

[AmiableApkallu]

I don't think this is at all true, though it depends on how you define "mistakes".

...

I suppose it could also be what you define as "necessary"

I literally illustrated both, if only you hadn't cut short your quote of my comment. Mistake = Hitting the floor (e.g., failing mechanics, perhaps badly). Necessary = The party wipes without the healer (because the healer hit the floor and can't be raised; see also: the follow up about Phoenix Downs).

And we're talking about casual content (Sebazy's comment that I quoted), where there are no meaningful enrages (unless, I don't know, you end up in the final phase of Eden Shiva normal with literally only the two tanks still standing). So, yes, non-optimal DPS is, for practical purposes here, only a matter of how long encounters drag on for.

[ForsakenRoe]

And we're talking about casual content (Sebazy's comment that I quoted), where there are no meaningful enrages (unless, I don't know, you end up in the final phase of Eden Shiva normal with literally only the two tanks still standing). So, yes, non-optimal DPS is, for practical purposes here, only a matter of how long encounters drag on for.

I think thanks to the stat squish, even two tanks could do that enrage, it's deceptively long

[AmiableApkallu]

I think thanks to the stat squish, even two tanks could do that enrage, it's deceptively long

The one time I actually ran into that exact scenario (after the stat squish), the two tanks got reasonably close, but they either needed a bit of improvement in gear and/or their rotations, or another warm body capable of mashing 111.

But yeah, the point still stands: the enrage is amazingly lax, and it takes a comedy of errors to make it even remotely menacing.