Healer role design change?

[vetch]

Scholar (5): Broil OR Art of War, Biolysis, Energy Drain, Dissipation, and Chain Stratagem.

Don't forget that Ruin II and then Art of War are DPS gains over Ruin I due to auto-attack windows so Scholar is the ONE healer whose core DPS playstyle, such as it is, can actually change depending on which dungeon the roulette drops you in.

Sage has failed on every front to be a healer for players who have been asking for more offensive options on healers, which shows a complete lack of understanding of how healers function in their own game. What I think the design team is capable of us creating enough healing output to ensure healers have the adequate tools necessary to complete different parts of their game. When they create a mechanic like Harrowing Hell, they actively look at what the healers can use and how they can play to endure that mechanic, but don't even consider what a healer does outside of that mechanic, what that accomplishes, or how that feels. There is a dissociation of time and gameplay with healer design that leaves them very ignorant to these designs which is what leads to such hilarious short-sighted design elements like Sage's entire kit.

And on top of that the sage healing is not even mechanically interesting. I'm still so disappointed that they looked at the funnels in Gundam, saw them splitting up to fly all over the place, act semi-independently, and make all-ranges attacks, and thought, "THAT'S our aesthetic! But you know what would make it really cool? If all the little independent funnels instead just flew together as a group like a normal weapon, did a twirly-sparkly at whatever target, and then went back to the sage." You fools.

We could've had four little nodes to intelligently manage to create overlapping fields of damage and healing and protection. Instead we got 'Scholar, but we White Mageified it'.

[Shurrikhan]

Whether it worked out well or not, Alexander tried this didn't it, 2 being trash mob city and the weird walker controls, 6 being a gauntlet of 4 bosses in a row, 8 being as multi-phase as an ultimate is nowadays.

I mean, "Kill the doorman + boss + add", "Kill adds", "Kill one + adds", "Kill one + adds" is still a far cry from having objectives for completion beyond just "Kill X", such as per an Escort Raid, a Heal Raid, or a Survival Raid.

As much as it'd be interesting (?) to have more variance in 'objective in the duty', it'd also cause insane differences in balance for certain classes.

I'm cool with that if it stimulates XIV finally more than just half-assing their "all jobs on one character" schtick. Though, I do also think that, despite allowing for not-directly-damage-producing skills to finally be weighed higher, it wouldn't reach quite any "insane" swings in overall job value.

CDs are still a thing after all, and, to take your SGE during Escort example, sure, Kardia is strong free healing, but... Regen is also strong near-free healing (remember, at that point, kill speed may be pretty secondary to keeping the NPC's/vehicle's HP high enough not to be killed by random damage at certain especially dangerous points), and WHM's greater-potency-per-GCD aspect could easily see benefit within the limits of MP. Or heck, what of Benediction, especially if there's no further penalty for letting the Escort NPC fall under X% HP nor a cap on the healing Benediction can put out, or a ReciAdlo+%Mitigation or Cover to get it to survive a hit that would otherwise require meeting a tight DPS check?

To answer your above hypothetical, I'd say... restrict nothing. If something's overly favoring one thing, adjust the way the encounter works. Benediction would otherwise cheese a heal-fight? Sub-divide the Healing-Objective's HP. Pure HPS would be too valuable in an Escort raid? Increase other pressures relative to it.

[IDontPetLalas]

I completely disagree. Case and point, Yoshi-P specifically stated that Sage was designed to appeal to the players who were complaining about wanting to have more attack options.

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Sage (3): Dosis/Eukrasian Dosis OR Dyskrasia, Eukrasia, and Phlegma.
White Mage (4): Glare OR Holy, Dia, Assize, and Afflatus Misery (You can also increase that to 5 if you want to include Afflatus Solace/Rapture which are not offensive but contribute to offense)
Scholar (5): Broil OR Art of War, Biolysis, Energy Drain, Dissipation, and Chain Stratagem.
Astrologian (11): Malefic OR Gravity, Combust, Draw, Play, Redraw, Minor Arcana, Crown Play, Astrodyne, Divination, Lightspeed, and Earthly Star. (Lightspeed is forced to be offensive because of the necessary weaving of cards currently)

Sage has failed on every front to be a healer for players who have been asking for more offensive options on healers, which shows a complete lack of understanding of how healers function in their own game. What I think the design team is capable of us creating enough healing output to ensure healers have the adequate tools necessary to complete different parts of their game. When they create a mechanic like Harrowing Hell, they actively look at what the healers can use and how they can play to endure that mechanic, but don't even consider what a healer does outside of that mechanic, what that accomplishes, or how that feels. There is a dissociation of time and gameplay with healer design that leaves them very ignorant to these designs which is what leads to such hilarious short-sighted design elements like Sage's entire kit.

I would agree , aside from saying that I find that putting in draw, play, redraw and even minor arcana should not be counted in offensive actions.
Draw, play and redraw aren't an offensive action in and of themselves , someone only benefits when a card is used with them. Also, Minor arcana is only of benefit when used with a crown, and even only one of the crowns is tied to an offensive action, the other is a heal.

So somehow I arrive at 8 - Malefic, Gravity, Combust, crown (if lucky), astrodyne, divination, lightspeed and earthly star

[ty_taurus]

I would agree , aside from saying that I find that putting in draw, play, redraw and even minor arcana should not be counted in offensive actions.
Draw, play and redraw aren't an offensive action in and of themselves , someone only benefits when a card is used with them. Also, Minor arcana is only of benefit when used with a crown, and even only one of the crowns is tied to an offensive action, the other is a heal.

So somehow I arrive at 8 - Malefic, Gravity, Combust, crown (if lucky), astrodyne, divination, lightspeed and earthly star

That's fair, but I was also thinking along the lines of, you're always using those actions in the pursuit of offense and will use them and keep their cooldowns rolling regardless of healing needs. Like, while Draw doesn't do any sort of direct damage or buffs, it's a required step in order to use play. I would still describe something like Dancer's step actions as "offensive" since they are how you maximize the value of your dances as Dancer, even if they themselves don't have any combat effects. Redraw is more arguable, I think, since you don't honestly need Redraw. You could take it off your hotbar and while you'll likely lose out on some optimization, the gain is so miniscule, and only a chance that it'll be a gain anyway.

Inversely, this is also why I did not include Pneuma, Toxikon, or Ruin II since Pnuema is ultimately a healing resource, and both Toxikon and Ruin II are situational, often unnecessary, and contribute a negligible amount of offensive momentum when used at their most effective state.

[Allegor]

The fact Toxicon* is the most visually appealing action in Sage's kit, even appearing in an expansion trailer, yet the actual spell is basically just Ruin II with extra steps is ...depressing.

*Just my opinion, but Toxicon II is a visual downgrade from Toxicon I

[Shurrikhan]

*Just my opinion, but Toxicon II is a visual downgrade from Toxicon I

There may be a fix for such...

[Shurrikhan]

I don't disagree.

But again they've stripped away so many rpg elements the game isn't even an rpg any more..

It's impossible to make fun and interesting jobs in a game that has no fun or interesting systems for those jobs to work with or manipulate.

Which again leads to a thought path where 7.0 should have no new jobs at all as they'd just be more of the same.. and instead overhaul the existing jobs.

I'd be cool with either way. I still don't like that Scouting has only one job attached to it, with 6 (or 7, if BLU is ever un-gutted) Ranged DPS vs. 5 Melee DPS, but I wouldn't be terribly sad to get no new jobs if we see some increased diversity among the existing ones.

Stormblood Lilies

Ngl. I still think choicefully-spendable ability-acceleration from each healing GCD was actually kinda brilliant as a fundamental idea.

The implementation? Terrible. The lack of contextual tuning? Terrible. Its power level? A joke where we're the punchline, and get punched.

But the fundamental idea was fine.

[ForsakenRoe]

Ngl. I still think choicefully-spendable ability-acceleration from each healing GCD was actually kinda brilliant as a fundamental idea.

The implementation? Terrible. The lack of contextual tuning? Terrible. Its power level? A joke where we're the punchline, and get punched.

But the fundamental idea was fine.

The fundamental idea was designed for a different battle design than the one we've got. CDR on abilities works well in WOW with Holy Priest, but this game's encounters are so scripted in who takes damage and when, that reducing CD on things is not a factor in decisions of how we heal. If an AST draws Lady with Minor Arcana, they don't think 'ah I can change my healing rotation because of this', they think 'this could have been a Lord ffs'. Secret of the Lily 2 (assize OR asylum has a 20% chance ON CRIT heal to reduce CD by 5sec) was even worse, RNG on top of RNG

A viable solution to keep the design would be to have a CD on a damage skill, and have the CDR caused by healing skills, affect that damage skill, as a form of soft-refund. But thanks to the 2min meta, even that would not work now

[Shurrikhan]

The fundamental idea was designed for a different battle design than the one we've got. CDR on abilities works

I feel like that would only apply if we were to agree that the two-minute-meta or similarly automatic and foolproof raid-buff-sync should outweigh any strengths from any options/possibilities that might otherwise frustrate it...

...That said, the kind of CDR described would actually work just fine in even a strict 2-minute meta, so long as it were actually potent. For example:

Secret of the Lilies

Your healing spells generate Lily Gauge for every 50 potency of effective healing done. This is augmented by increased-healing effects, but overhealing does not contribute towards this. Heals which affect multiple targets contribute only one affected ally's worth of healing towards this.

You may use still-recharging abilities by consuming Lily Gauge. Each point of Lily Gauge skips 1 second and 1% of the remaining recast time. Only as much Lily Gauge as is needed to instantly use the chosen ability will be consumed.

:: The amount of Lily Gauge required to rush a given ability is indicated on the ability itself.

Note: That particular tuning might be a bit excessive, as 100 Lily Gauge would be enough to quadruple cast Divine Benison, triple-cast Aquaveil, and double-cast Assize or Asylum, with each Cure granting 10 Lily Gauge, Cure II granting 16, Medica II granting 20, and Regen granting a whopping 30 Lily Gauge. But still, the basic idea of GCD-heal refunding via CDR is incredibly simple yet versatile.

And heck, optimizing that CDR would likely be more interesting that Misery, the nuke function of which could still be granted by myriad other means, if we wanted to preserve that capacity. (And why not? It could even still be tied behind Lily Gauge spending, or just be a new DPS oGCD option that could thus be accelerated, providing a flex tool akin to Energy Drain.) And it does all that without needing to clone Cure II and Medica just for a CD-locked version of themselves. Versatile. Efficient. Comprehensive.

Add to that a "can cast while moving" function to Thin Air and increase its frequency/coverage to make up for the 3 lost instant-cast heals per minute and voila, you've got a far more efficient kit with yet more agency.

But thanks to the 2min meta, even that would not work now

Then... maybe we shouldn't insist on (building solely around) said 2min meta? I don't think it's remotely the cause of all our woes, but it's not as if it's been terribly popular.

[ty_taurus]

Cooldown reduction is tricky in a setting like FFXIV. Let's say lilies could reliably reduce the cooldown of certain actions by 50%. If we're talking about a healing resource like Tetragrammaton, that means we're taking a 60 second cooldown down to 30 seconds, but unless you use Tetra immediately, every second you're sitting on it after the 30 second cooldown is rapidly declining the value of the cooldown reduction effect. And if you end up not using Tetragrammaton for 60 seconds or longer, the cooldown reduction became entirely useless. And that's a problem with having cooldown reduction on exclusively recovery tools. It worked with Aetherflow because you use Aetherflow on cooldown and could spend excess Aetherflow on Energy Drain, so a good Scholar player wasn't wasting resources while still taking advantage of the full CDR they benefitted from.

If we translate this to an attack action, even with the 2 minute meta, there are things you can do to make CDR work. For example, when I mentioned Tetragrammaton, I mentioned a hypothetical where we take a 60 second cooldown down to a 30 second one. If we have a tool that is usable on cooldown at all times, such as a damage tool, then you can work within values that align with 2 minute windows. 60 seconds > 30 seconds. 40 seconds > 20 seconds. 30 seconds > 15 seconds. 20 seconds > 10 seconds. All these do work within the 2 minute meta since you'll still have that resource available at the 2 minute mark.

That said, we don't need to talk as if the 2 minute meta is permanent. Just because nothing has been don't about it through all of EW doesn't mean it'll never change. I'm not going to try and sell the idea that it will absolutely be abolished in 7.0 or anything, but given how they approach major changes in this game, it makes perfect sense that even if they were planning to change it, that we wouldn't see anything until the next expansion anyway. The balance of EW has been built around it, and you'd need to make very drastic changes to break away into something else--the level of change you'd normally encounter during a new expansion.