Healer Suggestions Megathread

[Shurrikhan]

My aim is opportunity cost. Everything in earth stance will be 2.5s base cast time, even your DoT, you will not be able to weave at all in this stance.

Okay, but consider what considerations are rewarded now vs. what considerations would be rewarded then.

Dia currently fills multiple purposes. (Less than pre-Lilies, with only Regen offering another mobile spell and an 18s duration on that DoT, but still.) Once you remove its mobility, changing that over to a Holy Stance button, you have more fall-back options, but you haven't much added a new tool. Between Dia, Regen, and Lilies, you already had 5 lossless mobile GCDs per minute, increasing by up to 4 per minute per target on which Regen would be worth maintaining.

So now instead of optimizing the mobility value of Dia, you just fall back directly to either 60% cast times or 0% cast times. So you've lost 2 lossless mobile GCDs per minute (or more, if the DoT duration were reduced) while effectively trading Dia's leniency mechanic (diminish loss as duration fades) for this stance's that has a higher minimum cost but a lower maximum cast. But has that actually, then, added a consideration, or merely swapped it, while costing 3 buttons more?

Slapping a cost to your highest damage output would force you to think about when you can turret safely, make a miscalculation and you have to pay the cost to fix your mistake.

Kind of, but consider: If you early to a thereby waste limited mobile CD/DoT, it takes that CD/duration's time to be again able to use the skill losslessly. If you're late to a cast of a DoT/CD because you still had to move for another GCD, you've lost only that small portion of bonus damage.

The larger factor in optimizing turret damage is in allowing for your filler to fill. If you place the weight instead on just the 1 in 12 GCDs, you may occasionally cast it early, but you would have done that even before when using it as a mobility tool instead of an even more immobile one, while the cost of early use (that doesn't optimize its former/now-removed utility value) is removed.

EDIT: Another interesting thought, what if earth stance started at 1.5s base cast but gradually slows you down to 3s base cast time as you stay in the stance, but damage also gradually increases? Wind can start at 2.5s but gradually speeds up to 1.5s if you maintain the stance.

Yeah, something in direction would probably be fine, though you'd have to be all the more considerate of how you want this to be rotated, because you've introduced an opportunity cost to swapping at all. If you have a relatively-punished starting point that builds up to a relatively-rewarded max benefit specific to that stance, then you encourage --at least in itself-- sticking to the same stance. You'll need to add explicit or contextual reasons to nonetheless swap.

I more meant simply the fact that cleric stance was more “acceptable” to the ARR population because coils was never really balanced around healer DPS

It also, for all intents and purposes, wasn't a stance. It didn't change your actions or act as a means to efficiently sort an above-average number of actions into a more manageable bar-space; it just decided between which half of your already-available actions you wanted to waste your access to. It was shit, even before accounting for its terrible implementation (couldn't properly queue the release and it didn't scale with GCD speed, punishing imperfect timing, roundtrip ping, packet loss, and Spell Speed).

It wasn't so much "acceptable" as just... not awful enough for most to care about until they became more familiar with how wasteful, clunky, and utterly unnecessary it was.

But yes, in Aravell's original example, you'd end up with one default/normal stance, and then 1 or 2 stances that would be very infrequently dipped into, much like Monk's Fire/Wind/Earth (which likewise went mostly to waste, especially after 1.x, and which even late-Stormblood only managed to make one-third relevant [swapping between the default of Fire and the rotational stance in Wind... which was only used for a single skill anyways, thereby really just kinda adding 2 apm in bloat rather than adding a real stance]).