High Materia: A concept to allow for some player agency, without destroying balance

[fulminating]

Yeah I was trying to think of something that would work for the selfish dps. I just thought the sprouts all running into lines could have the right instinct. Not really sure what sam could have, targetable third eye maybe?

[Absurdity]

Healers:
SGE

Krasis is now AOE and applies to all party members, but has 10% increased healing effect instead of 20%

Breaking Eukrasian Diagnosis/Prognosis shields leave a 6s buff on that player, called Second Opinion. Pepsis can consume this buff, healing for the same potency it would have healed had the shield been consumed by Pepsis (450p ST, 350p AOE)

Kardia becomes an actual mechanic While under the effect of Soteria, Kardia applies one layer of Panhaima shielding (200p) per healing instance it provides. Soteria's CD is reduced to 5s, but it has an MP cost of 600

I would add one more potential effect here, simply because it has been bothering me the entire expansion that Sage doesn't have this.

"Soteria now applies Kardia to every player in your party for 15 seconds or until all stacks of Soteria are used, but Soteria no longer increases the cure potency of Kardion effects provided by you."

[fulminating]

The 1.0 relics had similar effects, flarestar, more vengeances, better shoulder tackle damage etc. (that is similar to the fisher relics, not as much this high materia concept)

[ForsakenRoe]

I would add one more potential effect here, simply because it has been bothering me the entire expansion that Sage doesn't have this.

"Soteria now applies Kardia to every player in your party for 15 seconds or until all stacks of Soteria are used, but Soteria no longer increases the cure potency of Kardion effects provided by you."

PanKardia is clearly going to be our level 96 skill, what do you mean? /sarcasm (but yes, one choice being 'Kardia can be made AOE in some way, with a downside such as lower potency or not-100% uptime' is definitely something you'd expect to see from a system like this)

Always a fan of adding build craft to the game, I think 14 is desperately asking for one. I think this system could interact with DPS - even if sometimes there is a "best build", the best build could apply to a single fight and require you to switch in other ones.

It doesn't fully work with the game right now, because I think some jobs within some roles are so similar that the difference between them would be just a trait switch in other RPGs. Of course, this works better because it doesn't require a full redesign of animations, artifact gear, relics, job quests etc.

Oh actually, that reminds me, you could use this system to bring back some old animations people miss. For example, first thing that comes to mind is DRK. What if the effect I had given, of 'Dark Mind now affects Physical damage too', wasn't just that, but also changed the animation to the old Shadowskin animation? What if there's one that applies a CC (eg Blind) of some kind to Flood of Darkness/Shadow, and changes it to the old Dark Passenger animation?

[Absurdity]

Oh actually, that reminds me, you could use this system to bring back some old animations people miss. For example, first thing that comes to mind is DRK. What if the effect I had given, of 'Dark Mind now affects Physical damage too', wasn't just that, but also changed the animation to the old Shadowskin animation? What if there's one that applies a CC (eg Blind) of some kind to Flood of Darkness/Shadow, and changes it to the old Dark Passenger animation?

Find a way to bring back Power Slash, old Dark Arts' animation and Butcher's Block and we have a deal, lol.

[dspguy]

The idea is good and well thought out, but keep in mind what the playerbase is. They'll find the "best one" that gives a slight edge and that will suddenly become the new meta and everyone will just go with that.

[Niroken]

Find a way to bring back Power Slash, old Dark Arts' animation and Butcher's Block and we have a deal, lol.

Being able to swap new skill animations with old or removed animations would be so nice.

[4clubbedace]

if there multiple options, one ot two will come out as superior, in most content that wont matter, in anything past extreme then that would be griefing , esp if enrages continue.

would be a waste or resources, so no

[ForsakenRoe]

The idea is good and well thought out, but keep in mind what the playerbase is. They'll find the "best one" that gives a slight edge and that will suddenly become the new meta and everyone will just go with that.

if there multiple options, one ot two will come out as superior, in most content that wont matter, in anything past extreme then that would be griefing , esp if enrages continue.

would be a waste or resources, so no

Which is why I specified 'these would not be direct damage increases, only 'very indirect' via optimized gameplay', e.g. by saving a healer GCD because a heal is made stronger somewhere. I am personally of the opinion that if people decide 'X is the best for the fight because it allows a 95% parsing team to get one extra Glare into the fight, but ONLY if you're skilled enough to get a 95% or higher', then that's completely acceptable. Writing off a whole idea because 'one would be best' is completely asinine in my opinion, because we already have something where we could see this occur: Job choices. One Job is mathematically going to be superior to any other in it's role, at any given time. That's a fact of how the game works. It's not possible to make their output exactly balanced. Some runs SCH is better because it has crazy Chain windows, sometimes it's not the best because a SGE rambo-crits every Phlegma. But we don't say 'well we shouldn't add more jobs, because the current ones are not perfectly balanced' do we?

'Perfect is the enemy of good'. If we saw a 1% damage variance between these effects, I'm personally 100% fine with accepting that if it'd give us a new unique system to work with, that wasn't just 'wow the Crit materia gives me more Crit than last expansion's Crit materia!', doubly so since the gap between BLM and it's competitors in the Caster role is anywhere up to 10% as it stands. It'd be up to SE to come up with the effects these hypothetical High Materia would have, anyway. If they made a choice for GNB be between:

- Blasting Zone has 100% Crit Rate
- Sonic Break lasts for 45s instead of 30s
- You can now Continuation Lightning Shot to fire a second Lightning Shot

...then yeh, one of those will obviously be better. But 'Bloodfest restores all Aurora charges instantly'? While it might be a DPS gain for your healers as they can spend less GCD heals on you, they're probably not going to be spending any GCD heals on you anyway, since we're too damn strong as it is when it comes to DPS-lossless healing options. So I'm not really sure where the stance of 'this will be griefing, because of enrages' comes from. You'll have to forgive my opinion/stance on the idea of 'balance' and 'chasing the meta', but until we see people insisting that 'you MUST play BLM in ALL content because it does 10% more damage than SMN or RDM', I don't think it's worth entertaining the notion that 'a system like suggested cannot exist because 'meta chasers will only use the meta choice'', doubly so because people can use non-meta stuff and do better than 'the meta' anyway, I've seen speedkill comps that have a non-meta job in them that are faster than 'all meta choices', Crit Variance exists and will contribute far more 'damage swing' than a system like this would, etc

[sindriiisgaming]

This goes hand in hand with my desire to see jobs evolve in mastery styles where instead of getting new skills you can augment your job like in mhw to either heal, mitigate damage or have more aoe utility