Healer role design change?

[ForsakenRoe]

I don't see anything wrong with liking Emergency Tactics. In concept, I think it's great also. It's just that, now more than ever, it's heavily power-crept. Ironically, it was already seeing power creep in HW when it was added because Indom was also added and is a considerably stronger healing tool that also has a short cooldown. ET would've really shined during ARR though.

ET would still have a place, I think, if it weren't just 'the next ONE spell has it's shield converted into raw healing'. Dusty's Black/White Grimoires idea made the most sense to me, have ET's effect as one of the stances you can be in, 'shield mode heals' be the opposite stance. I'd even add more to that and make it so that if you're in the 'shielding' Grimoire mode, your pure heal tools ie Indom are converted to do shielding, at a lower effectiveness (ie, 200p shield vs 400p pure healing), to incentivize... actually shielding, on a shield-focused healer, crazy I know

I don't necessarily 'hate' ET, I just put it in the same category as Pepsis: it's there, it exists, it's learned at level 58, it could be so much more than it is

If anything, I'd probably put the cast times on the big-trucking-hits, minus Misery? So, to me, at the very least, Quake, Flood, Tornado absolutely should have cast times (possibly a full GCD's), though I'd then want to see some timing-flexibility on them (if that wasn't in the mockup; can't easily go and check right now from on my phone).

Yeh I left those hard hits as 'the same cast time as their lower counterparts', so Quake was 1.5s, the other two instantcast. I think having them change to have a different cast time from their base form is not ideal in terms of fluidity (ie, you need to heal on the move cos mechanic, you press the heal, empower spells, now you can't cast that Banish because it's suddenly got a cast time), so maybe just having Banish/Flood be a 2.0s cast (slightly longer than Glare, but it does hit harder) might be enough, that'd put the count up to 13/24 GCDs having cast times, so just over half. Or maybe having Banish have a cast time, but the upgraded forms all being instantcast, things 'empowering and gaining instantcast property' is a lot less wonky for gameplay than 'thing empowers and suddenly gains a cast time you're forced to respect'

I'll just leave it as is, with the excuse of 'hey, if only 8/24, literally one third, of the GCDs ask the player to stand still, that makes the design super-casual-friendly, which means it fits way better with what SE's looking for'. I don't exactly associate 'healer role' with 'the class is glued to the floor', since in 'the other game' it's mostly only Priest and Shaman that get glued to the floor, iirc. If we needed a class in this game that is the token 'I cannot move even one pixel' healer class, I'd nominate it be SGE, because it has Icarus, in a similar fashion to BLM's refusal to move, and it having Aetherial Manipulation. Also if it's damage contributed to it's healing in a more robust design than 'teehee 170p on one guy', it'd stand to reason that it would want to stand still and deal damage constantly with as few interruptions as possible