I'm bored when I heal because I need more complex DPS rotations

[ForsakenRoe]

zzzzzz

part 1

Note that many people want no change, or only more healing. The first compromise is suggesting any deviation from that. The second is offering 75% of the way to what you're asking for.

Then it's a good thing I pitched (assuming Cleric gets nuked as per below) one damage button, and three healing/mitigation buttons, isn't it? I don't see it as being my problem if SE refuses to make the healing requirements actually demand we use our healing kits, I'm just following in their footsteps of adding 'healing tools that are not required (but might be if they make the HPS requirements higher for once)', and adding more heal/mit tools that we don't need would theoretically cause the chorus of 'we need more damage to heal with all these bloody healing tools we have' to get louder, raising the chance SE actually adds more healing required (theoretically)

Arguably RPR, but honestly, none. It's why Melee is the worst role in the game, as it's the one that doesn't have a spread. They're all different flavors of the same, and it's an annoying same. Though RPR arguably broke that.

You know you don't have to do the Double Communio thing if you don't want to, nobody's forcing you to do the 'optimal thing'. I play like an ape as BLM in EX roulettes, the few times I go in there as one. Dropping my Thunder, messing up slidecasts, forgetting to use Freeze before going back to Fire phase for AOE FlareSpam (so no umbral hearts, so 'Flare Spam' is just one Flare). Not a single complaint about how trash I am has been levied my way

WHM is 33 with LB, Potion, Sprint. PLD is 37.
WHM with +5 abilities would become the single most button Job in the game, at 1 more than even PLD. So your proposal is a pretty horrible idea, given that.

With the consolidations of Cure1>Cure2, and Medica1>Medica2, that takes 2 off, taking it down from 38 (current 33 + my 5 additions) to 36. If needed, we can remove my Cleric Stance as it's the most 'button bloaty' of the suggestions I had and doesn't really add all that much. That makes it 35. Problem sort of solved. If 35 is still an issue, it's time to start looking at SE's design and how much they love to give us random crap we don't bloody need, like Aquaveil, for the sake of 'ooh new shiny button'. Or Repose. Or Lucid Dreaming.

Got a link to your thread?

I did say before SGE being left alone would still fit within the confines of the idea (though in a weird way).

1: Dosis, Pneuma, Diagnosis, Prognosis, Dyskrasia and Phlegma, and any Eukrasian variants thereof (in other words, everything that currently has MP costs) now costs ZERO MP.

2: Soteria, Krasis, Zoe now have a 5 second cooldown, and an MP cost (maybe 1000 idk). Eukrasia now has an MP cost, albeit slightly lower (maybe 700, comparatively speaking)

3: E.Diagnosis, E.Prognosis and E.Dosis now have their base form's potency, with the additional effect being just that, additional, potencies adjusted to compensate. This means E.Diagnosis is 450p, with a shield equal to 120% of HP restored. E.Prognosis is 300p, shield equal to 100% of HP restored (yes it went down by 20p, it's not a big deal). E.Dosis now does 330p up-front damage, with a DOT effect of 35 for 30sec (same total, but half of it is now frontloaded). Currently, if you accidentally Eukrasia before a cast but don't need the Eukrasia, you have to either click it off (clunky) or suck up the loss of effectiveness. With this, all you lose is the MP cost. Which still sucks, just not as much.

4: Toxicon now has a 5sec cooldown, and an MP cost. Toxicon 2 is removed. Addersting is reworked as a resource into a 0-100 gauge. Addersgall is reworked into a 0-100 gauge. Addersgall is generated both passively at a rate of 1 per second, and actively via the class's skills. All previous costs of 'one Addersgall' now cost 25 Addersgall. Yes this means you can pool 4 Druocholes instead of 3.

5: A new button, Pankardia (MP cost 1000), is added as a level 68 skill. It's effect would be 'Applies 4 stacks of PanKardion to all nearby allies. When Kardion heals, every ally with PanKardion receives a heal of the same potency, consuming one stack per Kardion heal triggered.'

6: Soteria has it's effect changed to 'Applies 4 stacks of Soteria to self. Each Kardion heal is increased by 50% of the damage dealt by the attack that triggered the heal, consuming one stack. Area-Effect skills only count the primary target.'

7: Zoe has it's effect changed to 'Applies 4 stacks of Zoe to self. Causes Kardion and Pankardion to additionally apply a barrier, equal to 25% of the amount healed by the original effect, consuming one stack. Multiple applications of this barrier may overlap, strengthening the barrier's effectiveness. Does not stack with Eukrasian Prognosis.'

8: Krasis has it's effect changed to 'Applies 4 stacks of Krasis to self. Allows any non-instant spell to be cast with zero cast time, consuming one stack.'

9: Toxicon has it's effect changed to 'Drains the Addersting Gauge to 0, and applies 4 stacks of Toxicon to self. Offensive spells have increased potency, scaling based on how much Addersting was consumed. Consumes one stack per offensive spell used.' (at the moment, I'm thinking a 1:1 rate, so 100 gauge is 100p boost for 4 hits, but this can be spent earlier if needed, to reset the gauge to 0 and re-jig when you hit 100 to line up with raidbuffs better, for optimization gamers to play with)

10: Triggering a Kardion heal in any way generates 1 Addersting. Spending Soteria, Zoe and Krasis stacks have the additional effect of 'Increases Addersting gauge by 4.' (All 4 stacks total up to 16 gauge, 20 in total due to the Kardion triggering) Eukrasia grants 8 gauge on use. Spending Toxicon charges causes the Addersgall gauge to increase by 4 each. Addersgall spenders still retain their MP restoration effects, but the MP restoration potency might be rebalanced.

11: Phlegma has a 'Eukrasian' variant, which is a target-based circle AOE (like Phlegma currently is), does 50% of your current Phlegma's damage to the target and all enemies near it (and consumes a charge of Phlegma), but additionally applies Eukrasian Dosis to all targets hit for 15 seconds (this would mean a total potency of 475 per target in an AOE, over 15 sec), and uses Phlegma's current animation. Main Phlegma now uses Toxicon 1's animation, because it's our hardest hit and that animation is in the trailer for the game so it deserves to be front and center.

12: Rhizomata has it's effect changed to 'Adds 25 Addersgall. Causes the next MP cost to be reduced to 0. Duration: 10sec.'

13: Eukrasian Diagnosis' shield break effect changed from 'Grants one Addersting' to 'Grants Phlegmatic, allowing the cast of Phlegma without spending a charge'. This would not be a 100% refund (600 vs 660 of 2x Dosis), but it's better than what we have now. Also, going into a burst window with a E.Diagnosis, then spending your Phlegmatic charge, followed by the natural 2 Phlegma charges is probably a DPS gain for those optimization types, and would be a bit like DRK banking it's Dark Arts charge for raidbuffs

14: Pepsis now costs 500mp, has a very low CD (maybe 5sec), and generates 8 Addersting on use (even if it doesn't do anything you get the gauge). When Eukrasian Diagnosis or Eukrasian Prognosis break, they leave a buff on that player called Second Opinion for about 5 seconds. When Pepsis is used, it consumes Second Opinion to heal that player for the amount of HP the barrier protected for. Essentially, if you ever played a Character Action game like Viewtiful Joe, Wonderful 101, whatever, and used the Ukemi (jump button right as you land, instantly heal back the damage you took), it's that with a bit more leniency. And it gives Pepsis a much more interesting use case.

With something like this, I don't think having a damage kit of just 'Dosis, E.Dosis, Phlegma' is necessarily that bad. Like AST, the 'fun gameplay' doesn't necessarily come from the actual attacking, but how your kit interacts with your attacking, and in this case, with your healing too. Augments would resolve in a set order-of-operations, being Krasis, Toxicon, Soteria, Pankardia, Zoe. In other words, the game would check, in order, if you can instantcast via Krasis (Swiftcast would still be prioritized), then do the damage/heal calculation stuff. As an example, lets take a Dosis cast, at 330 potency, and the Kardia heal of 170 that it triggers, and follow it. We Toxicon that damage (my Dosis currently hits for about 10k before crit/DHit) and increase the potency of that hit, so this Dosis we're looking at is now 430p (becasue we spent 100 gauge to boost it). Next, we take 50% of the damage it deals (it's now dealing 13000ish, so 6500) and add that to the Kardia heal (for me, that's about 4500). So now our total heal is 11000. Next, we spread it to everyone at a 1:1 ratio via Pankardia. Lastly, we apply a shield of 2750 on top of the heal, to everyone.

Chances are you'd get 2-3 GCDs in while a boss casts the castbar for it's big raidwide, so that'd be a roughly 8250 shield due to it stacking on itself. And remember, it can't be applied alongside E.Prognosis, so if a boss has some way to chip away at shields before a raidwide (eg, the bleed from Aionagonia that ticks right up until Dominion is cast in P8S, or the whole of Firestorms of Asphodelos in general back in P3S with it's fire rain), that's gonna mess with your 'setup window'. Also, my Prognosis heals me for about 7.3k before crit, so the above rework would mean that, to equal E.Prognosis, this shield would have to have 2.5 untouched applications stacked up. No bleeds or raidwides or anything messing with it.

'Wait a second, 10k regen per hit, and building up to a 'potentially 11k shield on the whole party? That doesn't sound right, that sounds OP! Pure healers would be dead on arrival, etc' Well, yes and no. See, while it's 'theoretically possible', the factors that go into it would be ridiculous and never actually play out in practice. To put up that healing would require using all four augments at once, and with their 4 stack limit, you'd either have to quadweave them to get them all lined up (which noone would want to do) or have their durations staggered. You could Krasis and doubleweave effects together, getting you 3 stacks of 'everything is lined up', but then you have the other issue of pulling this off: MP costs. Applying 4 of these augments, plus the Krasis for swiftcasting to get them lined up better, would run you 4000 MP. Almost half your entire bar! Yes it's theoretically possible to do it, but you'd probably not need this amount of healing, and would rather juggle your Addersgall tools to reduce the amount of different augments you're applying, because you'd rather use the MP in a more rationed out way, to keep your other tools being used effectively and not letting them overcap, etc. I'm fairly sure some other stuff would need to be changed about too, such as removing the regen trait from Kerachole (or changing it to a barrier, cos, y'know, we're a barrier healer) to incentivize actually using these augments.

By having Toxicon and the new Addersting gauge be a damage increasing effect granted by Augment Stack consumption, Addersgall being refreshed faster by Toxicon consumption, and MP being restored by Addersgall consumption, we create a cycle of 'Spend A to get more B, spend B to get more C, spend C to get more A'. Ideally I'd want a 4th resource in the cycle to really lean into the identity of 'everything is 4' I seem to have made, but that might just be bloat for the sake of it. Either way, this I think would create a very different playstyle to the current healers, being as we're spending MP not on our healing, but on how we augment that healing. This has additional side effects too, for the more casual side of the playerbase. First and foremost is the fact that, if the base healing kit is MP-Free, we can spam it as much as we want. There's no need for anyone to say 'oh but what about the new healers this will be overwhelming' because if there's a panic situation, we can spam Prognosis and it is completely free. Eukrasian Prognosis, that still costs though.

Secondly, and this is purely by accident I swear, but this actually makes Piety be more than just 'OK I have enough now it's a dead stat'! See, if you generate more MP than you need, you can't really do anything with it in the current game, it's just...there. With this however, in the same way that we dump spare Addersgalls on Druochole just for the MP restore, we can dump spare mana on Krasis or Soteria or whatever. Why? Because spending those stacks gets us Addersting gauge, which gets us to Toxicon, and Toxicon gets us more damage! By getting more Toxicon uses in the fight, it would help to offset the 'less damage' that comes from having more Piety on your gear. Of course, careful balancing would need to be done to make sure 'stack Piety on purpose for more uptime on Toxicon' is not the prevalent strategy. Or maybe it wouldn't? Maybe 'Crit isnt the best stat by a country mile' would actually be a great breath of fresh air for the game?

Overall though, I think this would allow for a completely different mindset on how we heal, vs how we do damage. Everything feeds into each other in a cycle, incentivizing intelligent rotation of resources to overcap as little as possible, and clever use of which augment skill and when would allow for a real 'damage done = more healing done' aesthetic via Pankardia and Soteria. I didn't even need to remove any buttons from the class (not even Pepsis!), instead only needing to add one, Pankardia. If we do need to remove a button to make room though, I'd nominate Pepsis though. Nothing suggested is the 'be all end all', but I think it's fairly telling that people all have ideas for the class, and seem to have gone in completely different directions on it. It really shows, to me at least, how much room there is for growth for the class, beyond it's current form as 'SCH without fairy jank'.

Knock yourself out. I've not touched it for a long time so some things might not be fully up to date but I don't have time to go through and fix everything. Potencies Percentages MP costs Cooldowns etc can be tuned as needed. Wrote it like a year ago, so all the 'exact heal values' and such are based on 6.2 gear

part 2

But hey, I'm game: Make the argument that WHM is the most complex healer right now - and be serious about it. Like genuinely make the argument that you believe WHM is the most complex healer at the moment. I want to see this. /popcorn

I won't, because I don't find it to be the most complex healer, that'd be AST. But at the same time, I'd personally dispute it being the 'simplest' healer, just because it's got to optimize when to spend it's lilies, such that it fulfills it's healing requirements AND is able to put a Misery into raidbuffs at each 2min mark. Despite it's more proactive nature as a barrier healer, SGE is probably 'more simple' imo. It has way too many burst healing tools for 'reacting to big damage' for a barrier healer, Pneuma alone muddies the waters of the Pure/Barrier split far too much

lol, actually made me laugh. My part aside, I've never seen a healer thread (even ones I'm not party to, here, reddit, wherever) that didn't descend into walls of text. Though debateably at least some people DO read them...

Just goes to show how much passion to make the role 'the best it can be' there is from all sides I guess.

And because WHM in SB sucked and the one we have now IS legitimately better, it makes sense to preserve it for people that like healing now (again, no reason to harm them to heal the SB people since we can help the SB people out with SCH and AST without having to give them WHM, too) and because SB WHM legitimately sucked. I can't think of the last time I heard anyone actually defend the SB Lily system.

Which is why SE messed up when going into SHB. Adding the new lilies was a good idea. Nobody's got issues with that (Misery being a damage loss wasn't even that much of an issue for me but it was for some I guess). The issue was that Aero 3 got removed entirely, and Aero 2's duration got bumped up from 18 to 30s, so we use it less. Those changes were not needed at all. Misery and the Lilies could have existed alongside those two skills, as they were at the time. They could have upgraded them to Dia and Banish respectively, that's fine. But they said, for SB, they wanted WHM to have a more 'pure healer' focus. And WHM got shunned from PFs because AST was too good in comparison. They should have brought WHM up to AST and SCH's level, but instead they brought those two down to below WHM with things like 'lets remove ED again' and 'let's make AST's OGCD potencies absolutely dogwater low' (which should serve to prove that 'lower OGCD potencies to enforce GCD healing' probably isn't going to go down well), then buffed things to put them more equal to WHM. But still, the end result is they brought some jobs down, instead of bringing the lagging one up, because they couldn't accept their 'pure healer' design for WHM wasn't a good one.

Also, note that everyone loved the idea of Misery when it came out. A big meaty 900p hit for WHM of all classes? Hell yeh. Wonder why they liked it so much then, and celebrated when it was made damage neutral in 6.1? Because it's a damage button, and big damage number make monke brain happy. If it were just a case of 'it lets you heal damage neutrally', making the Lilies OGCD and removing Misery would have done the same

Seems there's a character limit on HB tags. Who knew?

Maybe you skipped over when I said it, but I said I'm amiable to your solution if SGE is left as is, because SGE was designed in EW, it has never known any past iteration that people fell in love with, so no one is actually losing out on anything. So I never actually opposed your solution, I'm not someone you have to convince. If we can't have a skill ceiling on every healer, I can settle with keeping SGE as it is, I'm not ok with throwing WHM under the bus once again given their history of being bad.

All we need is for Toxicon to be something more than 'scuffed Ruin2' IMO, and then SGE's current damage rotation can be as is. Instead, the skillcap of the class can come from minimizing GCD heal use via exploitation of various Kardia effects, like making it AOE, turning it into a shield, flat power boost for it, etc. It'd still have things like E.Prognosis for those times/skill levels where the damage>healing gameplay isn't gonna do it, like you don't have enough time to set up shielding via Kardia in a situation like Harrowing Hell, so you'd resort to the E.Prog spam. I even would make Prognosis cost 0 MP so if someone's panic-spamming (which they would have to be, if they're resorting to bloody Prognosis of all things) then MP cost isn't a factor they need to worry about. This way, it's easier to get people to dip their toes into trying the 'Damage>Healing' gameplay, because if they do mess it up and get themselves into a 0 MP situation, they can still heal. Ye Olde Cleric Stance showed us that if someone's got a barrier in the way of 'I am panicking and need to heal now' like a CD on turning off Cleric, then they are less likely to even try to use the system, so a Kardia expansion should be aimed to avoid that