Dawntrail Healers need a rework

[Renathras]

I think it could be possible to make GCD healing not a DPS loss. Maybe scholar could double the potency of their next broil if their shield breaks. Sage could have a "damage" kardia that does damage to a target when using GCD healing abilities. MP costs of GCD heals would probably need to be increased to still discourage needlessly spamming heals. These ideas would obviously need tweaks but I think it could be possible to make GCD healing not a DPS loss.

SCH could take a page from old SMN (specifically Egi-Assault) and have Ruin 2 become Ruin 4 whenever they cast Adlo or Succor, maximum 4 charges.

For those who didn't play it, in ShB, SMN had two GCD abilities, Egi-Assault 1 and Egi-Assault 2, both of which could have 2 charges. When using either, the SMN got a buff, "Further Ruin", which would stack up to 4 and which upgraded their Ruin 2 button into Ruin 4, a much stronger attack more powerful than Ruin 3 and instant cast. Over the full 2 min cycle (SMN was 2 min meta before there was 2 min meta), you'd get a total of 8 of these (both Egi-Assaults had a 30 sec CD). This was part of SMN's kit in two key ways, one was maximizing damage when Bahamut was out (Bahamut would attack any time you used a GCD and oGCD, meaning you would want to cram 8 GCDs into his window, which required some instant casts, so you'd want 4 Ruin 4s ready, as you also dumped a bunch of oGCDs, even Addle and needed the weaving space, because that got you an extra Bahamut attack - I think they later changed it to remove the oGCD part, but the same premise mostly remained), and outside of Bahamut, you had the other 4 to use for instant cast movement tools, as well as the Egi-Assaults themselves, which were movement tools. In practice, ShB SMN had VERY few actual hardcasts in the rotation.

...which is why it always gets me when people say EW SMN is "basically a Ranged Phys instead of a Caster", as if this is new, because it was hyper mobile in ShB as well, making me wonder if those people just didn't play ShB SMN but want to complain about the game being braindead from a place of ignorance anyway...but that's neither here nor there. The important part here is:

Further Ruin.

Just have SCH get a stack of it for each Adlo/Succor (and Physick if you're feeling spicy) that then let them cast Ruin 4, and make Ruin 4's damage 2x a Ruin 3 so that it's "damage neutral". Like WHM, this COULD generate gameplay where you want to have 4 full stacks of Further Ruin going into burst windows (since it would be a damage increase to blow them during burst windows), but people keep saying they want more damage optimization, so that would fit into that model.

.

SGE could already be damage neutral with its GCDs if Toxicon's main target damage was increased to 2x Dosis.

.

One thing I'll warn you is that there are people that will argue that damage neutral GCD heals are bad because...they lower the skill ceiling or something. "No wrong choices/mistakes" is the typical argument. Obviously, the problem with that argument is that they have no solution that makes GCD heal casting NOT suboptimal play. So we keep going through the situation we have with a glut of GCD tools that no one uses because they're "bad".

Yes yes, they can be good in some situations, but those situations are extremely niche. "If it saves you an oGCD use so you can use it at a more optimal time later" or something, but these are very niche scenarios and don't change the fact that they still leave GCD heals feeling "bad" to use across all situations and most of the game, leading to the "glarespam + oGCD weave heal" situation we have today.

.

Oh, wait, no, hit refresh on the page and you already have several people telling you we can't do it. So there ya go.

(Oh, but also note people in general will tell you stuff like Toxicon are bad because you can't use the intended mechanic to generate Addersting. Because doing so outside of untargetable phases is a damage loss. So...double edged sword, I guess? To which end, proposals abound for how to generate Addersting that aren't using GCD heals...which defeats the entire purpose.)