Healer role design change?

[Shurrikhan]

Or Discipline Priest in WOW, which is a healer that has to be proactive because most of it's healing is done through dealing damage and debuffing the enemy (Smite reduces the damage of the next autoattack by a flat amount iirc).

As someone who's played quite a bit of Disc Priest both before and after its rework towards a vampiric healer... I never quite got the hype. Ultimately, it was at best just a healer with slightly better than average combined DPS + HPS in situations with damage-window-exploitability... at the cost of being far less able to burst-damage or burst-heal. For all its indirectness, it's really just very... flat.

Tbf, there are still some periods where it's done better than others, gameplay-wise. When it's had far more bankability and dynamism in its DPS, it's at least also had some part of that in its heals... since they're one and the same.

And of course, syncing modifiers (i.e., by placing on-ally buffs from which they receive healing at X% of your damage dealt) to potency (your actual attacks' potency that may fall within those buff windows) always has its appeal, even if... that's essentially just the likes of Twin Snakes but ally-by-ally and doesn't feel like anything especially healer-esque.


But, I feel like the main thing Sage can take away from Disc Priest isn't that "damage-based healing is cool," but rather that "damage-based healing is really boring unless you have significant controllable dynamism to your damage and windows around which to sync it." Case in point -- Kardia being basically just a Regen with a benefit of being oGCD but whose existence squishes the job's GCD-based healing burst. Make it instead a % and give SGE some serious damage bankability (weaker filler, but more frequent and layered burst actions that needn't just be used on CD), though, and it'd actually be an interesting mechanic in practice.

[vetch]

But, I feel like the main thing Sage can take away from Disc Priest isn't that "damage-based healing is cool," but rather that "damage-based healing is really boring unless you have significant controllable dynamism to your damage and windows around which to sync it."

I'm having a real hard time thinking of ways to fit a genuine 'your damage amount determines your heal amount' healer into a 'save every damage cooldown for 60/120s windows or you're griefing' combat design.

[Shurrikhan]

I'm having a real hard time thinking of ways to fit a genuine 'your damage amount determines your heal amount' healer into a 'save every damage cooldown for 60/120s windows or you're griefing' combat design.

Simple.

Consider: What's the average frequency of an oGCD heal, which otherwise layers your healing 'burst' available? (Hint: It's not something bankable all the way to every 120s window.)

So long as you have a fair amount of dynamism outside of what can be banked for the 2-minute raidbuffs cycle, there's no issue with having a damage-based-healer even in a raidbuff-cycle-obsessed meta.
And, if a damage-based-healer were to offer even half the amount of healing control as a traditional healer, it would necessarily have that degree of outside-2-min-bursts dynamism.

It's a non-issue, as long as the job doesn't insist on leaving the 'damage-based healing' component as barebone and poorly situated as it is on SGE (where, again, it's more a variant of a periodic heal, not damage-based-healing, since it in no way scales with damage -- only with offensive casts).

[vetch]

Simple.

Consider: What's the average frequency of an oGCD heal, which otherwise layers your healing 'burst' available? (Hint: It's not something bankable all the way to every 120s window.)

So long as you have a fair amount of dynamism outside of what can be banked for the 2-minute raidbuffs cycle, there's no issue with having a damage-based-healer even in a raidbuff-cycle-obsessed meta.

Either I don't understand, or that's not really dynamic control of your damage profile. It's just the overcap management that all jobs have to do to optimize, i.e. not letting it sit unused such that it costs you a use over the course of the fight, and not using it so late that you don't have all charges ready for the burst window.

The way you're presenting it, your DPS healer would be able to pour on self-buffs/oGCDs to increase damage-healing when needed. But in a damage-obsessed game with tight DPS checks, wouldn't you be under pressure to manage them for max DPS with minimal consideration of their heal value, while leaving any uncovered healing to a co-healer who'll still have a bunch of free oGCDs or lilies with no opportunity cost, unlike yours? Similar to the situation with Aetherflow. You can spend it on heals, but if you're optimizing to beat an enrage, you don't want to.

[ForsakenRoe]

The way you're presenting it, your DPS healer would be able to pour on self-buffs/oGCDs to increase damage-healing when needed. But in a damage-obsessed game with tight DPS checks, wouldn't you be under pressure to manage them for max DPS with minimal consideration of their heal value, while leaving any uncovered healing to a co-healer who'll still have a bunch of free oGCDs or lilies with no opportunity cost, unlike yours? Similar to the situation with Aetherflow. You can spend it on heals, but if you're optimizing to beat an enrage, you don't want to.

I suppose it all depends really, on if the healing done outside of raidbuffs (supposedly suboptimal) removes the need to GCD heal at a later point. For example, if you put all your burst in raidbuffs cos 'muh parse' and then that means you have to use Prognosis later after a raidwide, that's gonna cost you more damage than saving some kit, then using that burst damage to convert to healing outside of raidbuffs to remove that Prognosis, right? The cohealer isn't gonna be able to cover everything, unless you're chadding the hell out of them and forcing them to Medica, this all sounds suspiciously like 'optimization' though

We have Energy Drain as a good example. We use Indom or Soil, even though it costs us 100p damage, because the alternative is being forced to Succor, and lose 295p of damage

[Shurrikhan]

Either I don't understand, or that's not really dynamic control of your damage profile. It's just the overcap management that all jobs have to do to optimize, i.e. not letting it sit unused such that it costs you a use over the course of the fight, and not using it so late that you don't have all charges ready for the burst window.

You implied that 120s raid cycles would cripple any damage-based-healer's control over burst healing for the sake of healing (rather than just for exploiting damage windows). But consider:

• If I have 2 charges on a 30s CD attack, I have 2 uses per cycle that I can time to wherever I wish per 30s period without any nominal rDPS loss.
• If I have 3 charges on a 20s CD attack (Addersgall, but offensive), I have 3 uses per cycle that I can time to wherever I wish per 40s period without any nominal rDPS loss.
• Drop that to 2 charges on that 20s CD attack, and I have 4 uses per cycle that I can time to wherever I wish per 20s period without any nominal rDPS loss.
• Etc., etc.

That's not some small amount of flexibility, and if nearly the whole of the kit had similar levels of flexibility, that's far more than enough. No one's claimed that damage-based-healing suddenly suddenly circumvent how cooldowns work; rather, the variants and features surrounding how cooldowns already work are more than enough to leave any such job with more than enough room to operate even if saving all that they can (which still would be a small portion of the total potency output per 120s) for each 2-minute raidbuff cycle.

The way you're presenting it, your DPS healer would be able to pour on self-buffs/oGCDs to increase damage-healing when needed

I have yet to mention a single self-buff for this? (The only example of buffs was in regard to Discipline Priest, which has no native oGCDs, and whose buffs create a balancing act between focus healing and total healing.)

And yes, you'd be able to, within a given period, use as many or few oGCDs as their bankability allows. And that's before even including gauge-builders (for lulls) and gauge-spenders (for burst), etc.

wouldn't you be under pressure to manage them for max DPS with minimal consideration of their heal value, while leaving any uncovered healing to a co-healer who'll still have a bunch of free oGCDs or lilies with no opportunity cost, unlike yours?

Again, even in those cases where neither you nor your co-healer need your heals for healing (see: Energy Drain), that's a non-issue; that's the point at which you'd already be using Energy Drain over the otherwise usually far more efficient Sacred Soil or Excog (in terms of additional filler attacks that can be cast from removing the need to GCD-heal) or casting Lily heals just to prep Misery-cleave. It's not a territory worth judging a single job design by; it neither breaks uniquely there, nor to unique extent.

At worst, the job would have slightly greater rDPS shifts between "farm" and "speedrun" status than most other healers because it has more control over its offensive ppgcd (potency per GCD) and pp15s (the amount of potency which can fully exploit the 15s of 2-minute cycles' every buff).


Again:
I'm not even a fan of damage-based-healers. To me, it typically feels flat compared to healers with more direct means each of damage and healing, especially in games with significant ppgcd and available burst (or, throughput in general) from both healer's offense and healing (i.e., where a healer going fully offensive would actually be tactically significant and noticeable on more than just a parser).

But, their problem isn't that some of their healing would be directed by raid cycles; all healers already have that same constraint, by the fact that they're equally obliged not to use a single GCD heal under raid buffs.

Rather, their issue is simply that they can't swing their throughput between damage and healing as much as most healers, because they're one and the same for them, which typically leaves any job of that overarching design with a lower ceiling to their sense of interplay/adaptiveness/risk-reward.

Depending on the context (in terms of healer the relative value of healer output [especially, offensive], short-term checks, difficulty, etc.), that loss may be purely theoretical, but as long as we're talking overarching designs, that does seem worth noting.