Healing Focus or DPS Focus

[TheDustyOne]

Neutral GCD vs oGCD is purely down to style and preference, they both heal without interrupting the stream of damage, it only tackles how one might go about designing the healing part of the kit, not the damage part. The big problem we have on the healing side is we have too much available healing and not enough incoming damage to put a dent in any of it, and if we were to stress that kit, we'd quickly find that amount of incoming damage would be too much for the average player, this would be true regardless of GCD vs oGCD.

Whatever refund system a neutral GCD uses should be complementary to a damage kit, not just merely a lily clone, like unlocking a DoT on SCH when a shield breaks, or a buff that AST can give to a teammate, etc. It doesn't have to be a storage of 3 stacks that burst all at once, it could be spent little by little to refund the damage, or it could pull a pneuma and do both at the same time. Or a job could just simply have oGCDs and not worry about a refund system at all.

I do think a subtle loss is better than completely neutral, as it prevents the whole "store for raid buffs" thing if the loss is big enough. Completely neutral ends up feeling like you can just use anything and it wouldn't matter, you'll get the same result anyway, better to make not healing risky but rewarding.

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Also to put in my 2 cents for the main topic at hand, ideally it shouldn't be a healing or dps dichotomy; it should be both. We heal when we need to because we should be the only ones capable of meeting the healing requirements, and we damage when we don't need to heal. The 2 parts of the kit should synergize and feel cohesive to the fantasy of the chosen jobs. One of the problems at the moment is the low healing requirements, so even if we made the damage kits engaging, we'd still be relatively unnecessary in a half-decent group in casual content and could be replaced by a DPS, so healing absolutely needs to be better, but of course you can't make inevitable healing downtime dull, so our DPS kits need improving too.