Because why not: A Moderate Proposal - SCH

[Renathras]

One nice thing this has shown is that we can find points of agreement and compromise, and even a workable system that makes (probably?) most people happy.

Contrary to popular belief, my issue isn't inherently with complexity, it's with things that I feel are needless (more steps to get to the same end) and clunky (unintuitive to understand and/or optimize, mechanically fighting the game's engine to achieve things, roundabout ways of doing things, and outright anti-synergies where the kit fights against ITSELF). It's one reason I do like the PvP kits, even the more attack focsued ones like SGE (though I don't like not having any kind of usable/spamable heal outside of combat...), because they condense things rather than having them be roundabout or convoluted to use.

As I've said before, I don't COMPLETELY hate DoTs, I don't like DoTs that don't do anything other than "you put it on the target...then wait for it to fall of...then put it on the target again", so things like Miasma ticks feeding into Energy Drain/Aetherpact use I don't mind, and Miasma doubling as a movement tool like Ruin 2 or Enchanted Reprise (RDM) I'm good with. I also like fewer, but more meaningful and useful buttons (the Physic upgrading to a slightly quicker cast, slightly less MP expensive Adlo; Fey Blessing being combined with Whispering Dawn; Lustrate upgrading into Excogitation; Miasma having Ruin 2's movement and weaving tool functionality but also a DoT and Gauge generator) as opposed to a bunch of random excess buttons that do the same thing (Tetra, Cure 2, Solace - while having individual use cases - are FAR less interesting than this SCH build's Aetherpact, Adlo, and Excog; having several DoTs that are...just flat DoTs and don't do anything other than exist to be a few buttons to push other than Broil IV that do slightly more damage).

Indeed, contrast this build's Aetherpact, Adlo, and Excog to WHM's Tetra, Cure 2, and Solace. We have a slightly weaker oGCD heal, but that consumes a secondary resource and is spamable, a weaker direct heal with a barrier attached, and a 3 per min limited resource spending heal (just like Solace) that has a strong heal contingent on the target's damage (or the buff expiring). Meanwhile, Tetra, Cure 2, and Solace work the same way, as an oGCD (with a CD), spamable heal that heals...for basically the same amount, and resource spender heal that heals...for basically the same amount.

One of the things that got me thinking about SCH as a base is that it's ALREADY somewhat complex, but more the diversity of its kit. Despite it suffering from button bloat, most of the buttons actually DO something useful. While half of WHM's kit may go unused, there's nothing in SCH's kit that goes unused or doesn't really have SOME use or is a carbon copy of something else in the kit, and a lot of its abilities work together like Recitation and Adlo or Excog, or Protraction with Adlo (and Recitation) and Deployment Tactics. So there's not a lot of fat to really trim to begin with, other than combining a few things that are less used (like Physic and Blessing) or things with potentially similar use cases (Lustrate and Excog) while modifying other abilities (like Aetherpact) to fill in any minor gaps created.

.

Regardless, from my side, it's removing clunk and making abilities that are more useful and a bit more interesting, and removing the anti-synergies of the kit as a whole.

This concept is proof that can dovetail with increasing DPS complexity and engagement, simultaneously raising the skill ceiling, but not to the point that people are being terribly left behind, and without needing busywork or unintuitive optimizations.

Thus, an example of a case where everyone wins at the same time...which well meets the definition of a good compromise, I think.

.

I think if SCH was made like this, people that like simple-ish things and healing focus still get that, and people that like optimizing damage and more skill expression get that, so it works for everyone even though the changes are RELATIVELY minor on the whole. Further, since this would be (MORE or less) a Healer being "left the same...ish", it would free up altering the other three Healer Jobs while keeping one with a more familiar style.

...while SCH was the last one I would have picked to keep more or less the same, it...honestly works.

.

EDIT:

I think your maths is off. I'll go and test it myself, but from looking at a couple of parses it seems that energy drain's closer to 3-4% contribution even without exclusive use on ED. According to some calculations on the yedlihlad beach, energy drain is about 4.8% of my damage if I burn all aetherflow + dissipations on it and use it under chain. Energy drain doing 3149-6494 (3426 median), which was about 267dps/5525dps or 4.8..%. I did forget to use dissipation toward the end, so should probably have had marginally more.
Sorry for the delay, took ages to add up all those numbers from the flying text

I was comparing Energy Drain to the PARTY'S damage output/boss's health pool to determine how much faster the fight would be. ~3% of a Healers' DPS would be around 0.6% of the party's total DPS, wouldn't it?

I should note: It would probably be a bit higher than that (due to the +5% party buff, foods, tinctures, etc), but we're still talking in the ballpark of 10-20 seconds, maybe, for the average fight, and something like 1%ish of the party's total DPS? And that's if you use AF for nothing other than Energy Drains, meaning presumably the fight is going well and your DPS know what they're doing so that 10 or even 30 seconds shorter of a fight is still RELATIVELY inconsequential.

It could probably be 10%, I was on the fence about it eclipsing aetherflow. I think it's important to have a way to dump aetherflow productively because encouraging overcapping is at odds with the design for all the other jobs - you don't want to overcap mp on drk, you don't want to overcap beast gauge on war or cartridges or samurai stickers or whatever.

While I don't think that's strictly NECESSARY - we don't worry, for example, about overcapping MP (we don't aim to do it, but no one's going to blow a gasket if you aren't consuming MP faster than you're generating it) - that was the reason for the Excog change, as it gives you something to dump excess AF on that isn't (outright) overhealing. Moreover, by spending AF on Excogs, you get a LITTLE of the old WoW Druid "rolling HoT" feel (that, unlike rolling HoTs, actually WORKS with FFXIV's combat model...), and it generates Faerie Gauge when you can expend on Energy Drains, but also on Aetherpacts if you need those instead.

So you have your overcap protection there, and you have your Energy Drain optimization on the side, and you get both of those things while not discouraging Soil/Indom/Excog use. In fact, it encourages their use (and Miasma uptime) as it unlocks yet more healing resources (Aetherpact) if you need it AND more damage (Energy Drains) if you do not.

You can argue it isn't perfect - nothing is and I'm sure we could come up with something that would always be useful (for example, if Lustrate/Excog was a barrier instead of a heal and lasted for 10 minutes meaning AT SOME POINT it will be useful) - but it allows for most of the same optimization stuff you have now while fixing the clunky/"feels bad" of having Energy Drain fight with Soil/Indom/Excog, and burning AF stacks on Excog probably won't feel bad to most people.

[Osmond]

It would be fine if yes, energy drain is separated from the aetherflow stack, become a 30sec, CD single use that does 100 potency, but gives a dmg buff for the SCH. Sure, a DoT can work as well. A weaker dot with the same duration as biolysis, yet it’s free dmg. If want to be AoE Energy drain, with potency fall off, but the DoT is the key, I’m ok with it. Don’t want to be to where 40+ EDs is what makes or breaks a run. When I hear that, I’m my head, “can we do less of that? Giving me flashbacks of ppl complaining of 111111111111 spam.”

[fulminating]

The ballpark distribution I usually go by is 1:1:2:2 for thmr. Which would be about 0.4% for 4.8% of a healer’s damage, but then up to doubled again because raid buffs are exceptionally strong. I don’t particularly think it matters that “just direct crit misery” provides more party damage, because it’s primarily a gauge management tool.
I think scholar lacking both big hits and high sustained dot damage doesn’t really do it any favours in this specific discussion particularly as chain is the primary raid damage contribution. Energy drain having a significant (eg x1.8) potency buff would be nice, but increasing it too much would tip the balance from aether flow management to aetherflow’s purpose. As it stands it contributes about as much as earthly star on ast in p5s on the top parse which I’m going to extrapolate wildly from because it’s not a terribly fun site to navigate on mobile.

[Semirhage]

Regardless, from my side, it's removing clunk and making abilities that are more useful and a bit more interesting, and removing the anti-synergies of the kit as a whole.

This concept is proof that can dovetail with increasing DPS complexity and engagement, simultaneously raising the skill ceiling, but not to the point that people are being terribly left behind, and without needing busywork or unintuitive optimizations.

These are all goals I can get behind. The summary of my major bone of contention with modern healer kits is that I think nobody, nobody should look forward to their (if we're going back to D&D/Baldur's Gate) level 20 gameplay being "I cast Mass Heal!.........Magic Missile. Magic Missile. Magic Missile. Magic Missile. Magic Missile. Magic Missile. Magic Missile. Magic Missile. Cure Moderate Wounds! Magic Missile. Magic Missile. Magic Missile. Magic Missile. Magic Missile."

Edit: And the reasons for that are all over the place. It's not *just* the repetitiveness (and that's an issue too), it's also that GlareBroilEficOsis Missile is a boring spell. It doesn't alter the battlefield, it doesn't force your enemy to switch tactics, it doesn't change what you do next, it doesn't have any measurable effect on what anyone is doing other than "well I guess this is a better use of time than standing around". It's perhaps the smallest bump in engagement you could do apart from autoattacking. That's my major opposition to current spammy healer design.

[ForsakenRoe]

Roe also threw in a suggestion to make Energy Drain potentially alter the rotation further by making the DoTs tick faster. This in turn could further reduce 1 or 2 Broil casts per minute for 1 - 2 DoT casts. I think it might need to consume at least 6 seconds. This makes the damage to be around 140 if it chooses Biolysis to 60 for Miasma. That way the damage kind of levels out close to a 100 average that it does now. I can imagine there to be some approval since we are attempting to reduce more Broil casts.

I went to bed after posting, but while in bed I was thinking about the difference in damage based on which DOT it chooses. I would be concerned about the short duration of Miasma though, removing 40% of it per ED used (potentially) is quite a lot. This is such an issue because SE decided to make the DOT tick potency bloody 70 per tick.

Hmm, rather than choosing randomly, maybe it just taking one tick from each? It'd roughly equal 100 potency when combined, puts more of a focus on 'keep the DOTs up', I'm not sure, maybe it's just a scuffed idea, I did have it right before going to bed so it's probably got some unresolveable flaws

Edit: And the reasons for that are all over the place. It's not *just* the repetitiveness (and that's an issue too), it's also that GlareBroilEficOsis Missile is a boring spell. It doesn't alter the battlefield, it doesn't force your enemy to switch tactics, it doesn't change what you do next, it doesn't have any measurable effect on what anyone is doing other than "well I guess this is a better use of time than standing around". It's perhaps the smallest bump in engagement you could do apart from autoattacking. That's my major opposition to current spammy healer design.

This is the crux of the matter, isn't it. We press Fire 4 a lot more than anything else in the BLM kit, but due to a combination of factors. One is that unlike healers, BLMs are 'pressing other buttons too' like Xenoglossy, Thunder 3 procs, doing stuff in Ice to buy time to restore MP, it's not as egregious (looking at a P7S run by a top BLM has this:

On the flipside, we're using 130+ Glares, Broils, whatever. But the main issue isn't just that. It's that Fire 4 feels good to press, it has impact. Broil/Glare/the other two just... don't. They sound weak, they look weak, they feel weak.

I was thinking, while waking up today, a sort of 'thought experiment' but not really. A simple question, with a simple answer: What is the filler spell for RDM? The obvious answer is 'Jolt' because that's what you use when you don't get any procs, but it's also your absolutely last resort option to use. It's used less times than the other four Ver-spells. Same for SMN, it can be argued that it's filler is Ruin 3, and you only use that once per minute to realign the rotation. So the question I'd ask is, we have a filler skill for each healer (Glare etc), but that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be the majority of our spells cast, to the extent it currently is, right?

edit: i did some maths on my WHM proposal on the above topic (healer filler spell lacks impact), I'll whack it in HB because I don't want it to derail the thread too much

So I took a 'reasonably alright' run of mine from P7S (as that is the fight I used for the BLM example above). This is my number of casts used for damage:



Additionally, I have 20 Raptures, 4 Solaces, 1 Medica 2, and the fight was 10:57 duration. Yes, I missed two whole Miserys, sue me. Point is, working off of the design I pitched (so, Dia 12s duration, new Banish with 15s CD, that GCD heal tool, you know the drill), I came up with these numbers:

204 glares
21 dia
8 misery (24 GCDs to prep)

204 glares baseline
10 misery, plus 30 prep GCDs (8 less glare)
55 dia (34 less glare)
44 banish (44 less glare)

new total glares = 118

---------------------------------
hypothetical 'optimization' zone
---------------------------------

note, I casted one medica 2, so that would be replaced by one of the below BOTE casts. beyond that, this assumes that the player is popping BOTE
right before 1min windows, to put the damage in burst window (in case my Cleric Stance 60s CD selfbuff idea gets in)

10 BOTE casts (10 less glares)
10 quake casts (same button but it looks cooler, 10 less glare vfx instances)

Final result: 98 glares to look at instead of 204, we've over halved the count. Does this 'fix' the lack of impact? Not really. But it does get the spread of damage actions on the 'Casts used' chart on the log to look more like the BLM one, and that's a success of it's own I'd argue

[Semirhage]

edit: i did some maths on my WHM proposal on the above topic (healer filler spell lacks impact), I'll whack it in HB because I don't want it to derail the thread too much

I wouldn't say no to fewer casts of the filler spell. Not really so much a criticism as a comment that springs to mind though. One of the tiny but incredibly important bits sorely missing from the healer kits that makes the sheer number of Fire 4 casts feel WAY better than the healer filler casts is just that: Fire 4 isn't filler. It actually flows naturally with how the kit works. It's letting your MP bar fill in ice mode so you can swap to your mega blaster mode and start firing on all cylinders, riding that attack wave as long as you can, using your Umbral Hearts and such to ensure you can ride that wave as long as possible before cooling off again. You get the feeling that it's what you're supposed to be doing. The healer kits do the opposite. They do their damnedest to make you feel like healing for its own sake, the floor of your skill, is what you're "supposed" to be working toward. The downtime activity is tacked on there as an afterthought because *grumble grumble* fine I guess healers have downtime after they've become skilled at it or something *grumble grumble*. This utter reticence to acknowledge that creating downtime is your goal just murders the hell out of their endgame engagement. The downtime doesn't even have to be dealing direct damage, but it's the easiest thing to aim at in FFXIV's damage-centered combat system. Downtime exists, it exists in large quantities, and these quantities only get larger the longer you play and the more skilled you become. Every time I look at these kits as they exist in Endwalker again it makes me wish they were designed with that consideration in mind, instead of as a resentful afterthought that the person tackling them grudgingly admits that FINE, maybe you need a wimpy attack spell or something because these healers keep telling me that spamming healing spells all day isn't the only thing they want to do for some kuh-raaaaaaaaazy reason. I fully appreciate that generating that feeling is far more than an adjustment to a skill or two. It's a matter of whole-kit cohesion that's much easier to nail on a DPS than it is on a healer.

tl;dr the healer kits are designed to make you feel like your downtime is just sitting and spinning on your thumbs waiting for the next outgoing damage instead of a reward for playing well. That's why they're not fun. You feel like you're working toward more sit-'n-spin instead of something that actually feels good to do.

[Tigore]

@ForsakenRoe

Judging by the like responses, it looks like it the Energy Drain idea has some potential rather than being scuffed for some players. Taking 1 tick from each DoT solves the random problem. It looks like others may want a 1% or so mana regen returned to it so it is more than just making DoTs tick faster. We haven't really introduced any new high mana spells yet to capitalize on it though. Pretty much just getting mana back from raising someone currently.

[GrimGale]

Eh I dunno. I'd say making Glarebroil spectacularly visually snappy spells would quickly feel old and kill any sense of spectacle after the 10th cast in a row. Much like SMN's design no amount of spectacle will save a mechanical gameplay that is repetitive.

Having highs and lows is what makes things special. That's why "builder>spender" classes are an easy way to create gameplay flow because doing things right to get that "I now finally blast everything" feels satisfying.

Of course, you have to match that visually spectacular thing with a significant gameplay impact or else you'll make the player feel like crap.

[Tigore]

It may not have to be a nuke spell for some healers. Maybe Royal Road for AST and Eye for an Eye counters on the tank for SCH?

[GrimGale]

It may not have to be a nuke spell for some healers. Maybe Royal Road for AST and Eye for an Eye counters on the tank for SCH?

Royal Road Balance+Spread used to be that high after the build up. Where you'd unleash a mega buff and all your party members would see their numbers skyrocket. That felt impactful (Maybe too much so) but was visually kind of underwhelming.

They changed it so that the visual part was much more appealing with Divination: Now when it's time to unleash a global power up your character reaches for the heavens and inscribes a beatiful starlit wheel of the twelve upon the ground with a distinct chime. And yet it's a measly 6% extra which barely registers in the other players unless they have a DPS tracking tool. They used to hit for a 1000 damage. Now they hit for 1060. Whoa.