Dawntrail Healer Change Predicitons

[Shurrikhan]

Trying to revive SB lily design is a bold decision but I can’t say I actively hate it

More as a pretty insignificant bonus, outside of now entering combat with 3 charges instead of 0.

The main thing was to let the mobility bonus of Lilies linger a little bit and to remove any arbitrary limits on what healing actions they could be spent on while saving button count for the effort. If Lilies had been left the same, Thin Air would still have been the obvious place from which to add a bit more mobility to WHM's kit. So I figured I may as well bundle them together.

Again, not ideal, but a small improvement despite remaining dev-realistic.

Something I desperately want that I think could actually be added because it doesn’t require changing philosophy is please give WHM back its CNJ roots, I’m so sick of white sparkly stuff, holy is already the light spell, why did we have to lose both our earth spells and our air spells

Return glare to stone and dia to aero pls

Even if you do nothing to actually fix WHM pls do that

I'd love this.

...Luckily, in the meantime, there may or may not be *cough* mods *cough* that do exactly that, visually speaking.

(The Thin Air absorption of the Lily mechanic, even, was just the Blessing of Wind mechanic I had planned for a more ambitious Elements-centered rework, but with the offensive benefits swapped over to Blood Lily.)

[ForsakenRoe]

Ironically, your idea isn't completely insane, after all 'selfcontained CD reduction on skill A, caused by use of skill B' is Holy Priest's thing.

I find it funny that you have no confidence in them being able to code 'scale MP restoration based on damage mitigated', but somehow 'DOTs/HOTs now tick once per second instead of per 3' made the cut, that's some optimism

[Shurrikhan]

Ironically, your idea isn't completely insane, after all 'selfcontained CD reduction on skill A, caused by use of skill B' is Holy Priest's thing.

I find it funny that you have no confidence in them being able to code 'scale MP restoration based on damage mitigated', but somehow 'DOTs/HOTs now tick once per second instead of per 3' made the cut, that's some optimism

They're actually pretty different in terms of complexity.

One is just setting a value from 3 to 1.

The other requires multiplication of an inverse of a product (how much damage it would have done if it weren't mitigated by all these effects, to then find out how much damage reduction this specific mitigation buff was responsible for).
/shrug

So one requires a child. The other a highschooler. We should be aware of our limitations, but needn't sell ourselves short.

[PercibelTheren]

My prediction is that part the AST rework will make either Draw or Play (or both?) a GCD, to alleviate the hectic burst windows, much like they did with Ninja's mudras.

I'm seriously hoping it's not that. I like AST specifically because it has something other than standing around to do during OGCDs.

[Shurrikhan]

My prediction is that part the AST rework will make either Draw or Play (or both?) a GCD, to alleviate the hectic burst windows, much like they did with Ninja's mudras.

As much as I hated the GCD-ification of NIN Mudras, especially since the fix actually requested was just to stop adding players' roundtrip ping to their uptime costs from oGCDs (an entirely unnecessary design decision)... I wouldn't particularly mind this... buuuuttt...

Consider: Fall Malefic does 325 relative potency at present (250 raw, increased by 30% by Maim and Mend II). At the present 6% bonus, the ally would have to deal 5417 relative potency in 15 seconds for using that Card not to be a damage loss.

Now that Cards wouldn't be free extra rDPS, the buff and duration would have to be hugely increased to allow AST to still use their Cards at all.

That in turn means that AST's total DPS is going to be that much more dependent on having perfect Card targets. I'm not opposed to that, but it can be a feels-bad for many (especially, a good and well-geared AST in a bad and/or poorly-geared party), especially if you don't bring back the ability to spend Cards on direct attacks instead (a la SB Lord of Crowns).

I imagine you'd want to tune this so that even the damage between bursts is still worth using Cards on? In that case, you're frequently looking at as little as ~3300 relative potency done in 15 seconds at level 90.

Let's call the breaking point... 3000 relative potency (from someone of the same ilvl) to leave a tiny bit of safety margin and allow it to be used on tanks at least conditionally. That'd put us at an almost 11% damage modifier required.

Or we could that up to 12% for a prettier value and to be more certain the Cards will be worth it, and we can tune Malefic and Combust accordingly for rDPS parity afterwards, though then we'd really be accentuating those burst damage differences and exploiter advantage (which we been accounting for as much as we should in discourse, especially with aDPS removing all single-target buffs because of their winner-takes-all nature making them difficult to draw conclusions from about job performance gaps).

Alternatively, we can do 9% for 20 seconds, smoothing out those advantages a bit to make balance easier, but also obviously making the benefit less exciting to play around.

Tl;dr: We can do that, but we'd need to double the Cards' effect to make them not an rDPS loss (i.e., to not be trap).

[Aravell]

My prediction is that part the AST rework will make either Draw or Play (or both?) a GCD, to alleviate the hectic burst windows, much like they did with Ninja's mudras.

I would hope not, part of what I enjoy about AST is the weaving gameplay. There are other ways they could fix AST without slowing down the gameplay.

[UkcsAlias]

My biggest hope is getting a damage ability change.

The 1 button now becomes a condensed chain on its own (a 3 button combo with scaling potencies - unlocked at for example lvl 91 and 97), while initialy not changing anything gameplay wise. Later on (lvl 100) you get a new damage ability which activates upon using the 3rd ability in the chain. Providing a little variety similar to archer.

This chaining on that then has some varieties acros the classes (SGE for example also granting a heal through the trait in it, WHM granting a freecure). And it doesnt reset upon using other abilities.

And with that, i also hope they are finaly going to get rid of cure 1 and rework that to cure 2 completely. Also condensing chains in them if needed. (it realy doesnt matter if cure1 requires 700 mana in low level duties, so the traitwise upgrading will be fine then)

But yeah... thats hoping.

[BRVV]

They're actually pretty different in terms of complexity.

One is just setting a value from 3 to 1.

The other requires multiplication of an inverse of a product (how much damage it would have done if it weren't mitigated by all these effects, to then find out how much damage reduction this specific mitigation buff was responsible for).
/shrug

So one requires a child. The other a highschooler. We should be aware of our limitations, but needn't sell ourselves short.

You are ignoring the technical challenges. Think about the fact that server ans synchronisation for all content needs to work basically without delay for everyone, being in sync, every second instead of every 3 seconds

[PercibelTheren]

I would like them to kill all the Cure I and Benefic I buttons. Just make them upgrade to Cure II and Benefic II. If we are really hellbent on keeping Freecure and the automatic healing crit as a feature, move it to Glare and Malefic. At least that way you incentivize the healers to DPS and hopefully nudge Sprouts into that direction as well.

[Shurrikhan]

You are ignoring the technical challenges. Think about the fact that server ans synchronisation for all content needs to work basically without delay for everyone, being in sync, every second instead of every 3 seconds

You realize the server already rechecks our position more than 10 times per second in most instanced content. Not per 3 seconds.

I've played on ethernet with ~150 ms less ping than the person sitting two feet away from me on wifi, for whom DoT/HoT ticks registered at the same time despite the higher ping.

The game also polls >10 times per second in instanced combat. Not... once per 3 seconds. At least 30 times that frequency.

The DoT ticks were set to 3 seconds, rather than a far more standard 1 second, simply because the ARR Beta originally set the GCD, MP/TP, and DoT/HoT ticks all to 3 seconds. (Yes, it only decreased to a 2.5s GCD not long before release.)

I'm not sure why you're acting like a 1s DoT tick timer takes some sort of novel technology, when it was literally the norm among MMORPGs since the '90s.

WoW only used the occasional differing tick rate because despite launching in 2004 DoTs there could tick separately instead of on a combined timer and some would instantly complete their first tick, thus making a slower tick rate have faintly more up-front power.