How MUCH healing can non-Healers do?

[ty_taurus]

I feel like the tuning on that is where the rubber meets the road of "does this work or not". (Also, I've seen a LOT of enrages about 3-5% health in Extremes, so that isn't nothing.

I guess my perspective on this is it largely seems to be a case of "asking for more work to do the same thing", which seems...annoying more than enjoyable. (Though you already know I support making some kind of Holy boosting ability to give it a use in single target encounters and to make Holy work like Cure 3 as far as targeting goes - I laid that out pretty well before, so I'm sure you remember it?)

At the end of the day, EX, Savage, and Ultimate exist for those that pursue challenge in some degree. They should not be designed to cater to someone who is not interested in challenge, and a part of that challenge comes into learning to perform your tools to the best of their abilities. At the end of the day, every piece of story-driven content (anything with a set of quests attached to it) is clearable regardless. Light content like FATEs, Treasure Maps, Deep Dungeons, etc. also is clearable no matter how you approach your abilities. There should be no issue with this. If a player does not care about playing more challenging fights, why would they take on EX, Savage, or Ultimate to begin with?

And even if that player really wants the EX mount, recall that the average player won't be boycotting those offensive tools, they just won't be using them to their maximum potential, something almost no one actually does anyway. The difference in their output would be even smaller than that 3-5% range. The only person who would start enforcing enrages is the person who uses none of those rotational abilities at all. If you were to still use that Holy conditional, Dia, and Assize, that improves your odds pretty significantly as that would be about half of the rotational damage potential or so, all with that hypothetical in mind.

You see it as "work." I see it as "playing the game." At the end of the day, I honestly don't really care as long as every job has the option to improve their performance through regular decision-making within their ability list. Any job that creates an environment where 1 ability is used more than every other ability is a failure to the MMORPG gameplay model.

You were gone while we had this discussion a while back, but I also suggested a system like this:

You know, I was actually thinking about something similar with Genshin's constellations in mind. In Genshin, getting duplicates of a character unlocks new perks that are generally flat upgrades to your character.

Here are some images of what that looks like:

What if instead of getting 1 new action or trait at levels 92, 94, 96, 98, and 100, you instead have something like this, but instead of 1 option, each level is associated with two similar perks, and you have to choose only 1 of them. The menu would look kinda like this:


Each side would have a theme. For White Mage, this could be the Astral path and the Umbral path. The top two icons linked are what you get at level 92. So let's say those effects look like this:

Umbral Path: Mhachi Light
Increases the potency of Glare III by 10, increases the potency of Afflatus Misery by 40, and increases the potency of Dia's damage over time effect by 5.

Astral Path: Floral Force
Decreases the potency of Glare III by 10 and the potency of Afflatus Misery by 40, and unlocks the use of the action Tempest.

Tempest: Deals unaspected damage to the target and all enemies nearby it with a potency of 510 for the first enemy and 40% less for all remaining enemies. Each time a lily is added to the Healing Gauge, enables 1 use of Tempest.

The Umbral Path is easier and offers a smaller damage variance based on performance while the Astral Path creates more room to optimize and thus has a slightly higher high but also a lower low, and your performance makes a bigger difference. The difference in these two options, if my math is correct, is the Umbral Path is a potential gain of 340 damage per minute if every GCD is used on damage or lily heals while the Astral path is a gain of 360 per minute if every GCD is used on damage or lily heals, but also gets a little more out of buffs this way as well. The difference is small, but the player has an easier path or a harder path. This kind of system would hopefully allow the design team to give healers a more aggressive route without worrying about scaring away the novice healers since they can just take the easy road.