Healer Suggestions Megathread

[Aravell]

I think one of the most egregious issues for Speed is that it doesn't affect HOT/DOT tick rates, just damage dealt by them. I suppose you could argue that 'oh instead of getting a 11th tick at the end cos of your haste, you get that same 11th tick's damage, but equally spread across the duration', but it doesn't feel as good/noticeable. Also, a 3s tick rate on HOT/DOT ticks is just annoyingly slow. There's been times where I think 'oh that guy needs to be 100% for the doom, he's got a HOT he'll get there in time' and he does not get there in time, because the HOT ticks are so far apart. Halve the potency of every DOT and HOT tick, and make them tick every 1.5s, and it'd feel so much better to use them. Instead of 5 ticks of 130p from your Physis 2, it'd become 10 ticks of 65p. Biolysis would go from being 10 ticks of 70, to 20 ticks of 35, etc.

The very funny thing about tick rates is that they show that they don't have to make everything tick at the server tick rate of 3 seconds, Flamethrower on MCH ticks every 1 second. I don't know why they can't make HoTs tick faster so it works better.

[Post]

The very funny thing about tick rates is that they show that they don't have to make everything tick at the server tick rate of 3 seconds, Flamethrower on MCH ticks every 1 second. I don't know why they can't make HoTs tick faster so it works better.

I may be incorrect, but I think the reason for Flamethrower being an outlier is that it's not a debuff based Dot but a ground targeted one, that is, an AoE effect on the field. Numerous boss encounters use similar field effects like these (e.g. 9999 damage per second wall on Thordan Ex), but they also still make use of ones that apply a dot if stepped into that will tic every 3 seconds. This tic might still one shot you in some cases, but...

Other examples are Asylum/Sacred Soil/Doton, which now apply their effect immediately in addition to their over time component, making their actual strength greater than displayed. This change was done for consistency; some times you'd use the action .1 second after the global DoT pulse and then the effect wouldn't trigger until 2.9 sec later, and other times the inverse would happen. Buff based effects work without the immediate free tic, but can be refreshed without worrying about "clipping" a tic from the total duration due to the global server tic.

Maybe they legit can't make DoT and HoT buffs tic faster than the 3 sec norm?

The speed change to affect dot potencies after how many years of it being horrible for over time effects might be evidence of this, but could just as easily have been to prevent the system from becoming "disorderly." They like things to be pretty pristine, after all.

[Shurrikhan]

I may be incorrect, but I think the reason for Flamethrower being an outlier is that it's not a debuff based Dot but a ground targeted one.

This, kind of. Or, perhaps more importantly, it's just a sequence of individual actions, not a DoT at all. Salted Earth, Shadowflame, Doton, and Flaming Arrow, by contrast, still tick per 3s, but they too have no debuff component; they're auras, not status effects.

Maybe they legit can't make DoT and HoT buffs tic faster than the 3 sec norm?

The speed change to affect dot potencies after how many years of it being horrible for over time effects might be evidence of this, but could just as easily have been to prevent the system from becoming "disorderly." They like things to be pretty pristine, after all.

Skill Spell and Spell Speed affecting periodic damage is already noted by the 3.0 patch notes.

Iirc, it was also accompanied by a nerf to the GCD-reducing effect itself, actually making the stat potentially worse for Monk and BLM, much like the change (also with 3.0) to make Critical Hit quadratic (affects both chance and bonus of crits) could be considered a poorly disguised nerf to Bard's River of Blood procs (back then, regardless of song, DoT crit ticks had a 50% chance to refresh Bloodletter/Rain of Death) since it significantly reduced the crit chance added per point of Critical Hit.

While on this tangent, some other random tidbits at least somewhat related to speed:

• BLM's cast-speed acceleration from AF3/UI3 used to affect a second action if queued quickly enough (allowing for the at-the-time baseline 3.5s Fire III and Flare to each be cast in 1.75s, saving nearly a half-GCD of uptime).
• DoT ticks and MP/TP ticks do not follow the same timing / have not always follow the same timing, though each is an instance-wide shared interval of 3 seconds.
• Fey Light and Fey Glow originally affected the Skill Speed and Spell Speed stats themselves, rather than offering a flat % bonus to either (later consolidated into just Attack Speed for all and then removed from the game).
• Astrologian's Spear used to reduce all Ability recast times, while Arrow reduced all weaponskill, spell, and auto-attack recast times (at the time referred to simply as "Attack Speed" before the language was swapped to the clearer but more verbose).
• PvP skills previously allowed us to separately debuff enemies' Skill Speed (via Aetheric Burst) or Spell Speeds (via Somersault). Granted, we could also separately debuff INT, STR, DEX, magic resist, range, hit rate, etc., alongside stunning, silencing, slowing, snaring, binding, and pacifying back then.