What we want as healers: A coherent List

[AutumnsHollow]

I personally do not want some of the things you listed, particularly nature magic back to white mage. I like that they removed the nature magic remnant from 1.0 to justify conjuers existence. White mage has always been about healing and holy in prior final fantasies and I prefer this iteration to continue to have holy magic.

I always thought it was weird that we didn’t have a priest or spiritual magical based healer and they decided to turn conjurer into white mage. It felt very ham fisted and they probably did it because of final fantasy reference and to draw people. My idea of white mage that has been built over 13 final fantasies doesn’t really align with the ARR, heavensward, or stormblood white mage. I personally think that’s the only thing about shadow bringers & end walker white mage they did correctly.

I would like another class to have nature magic akin to a Druid from wow because that is a class fantasy that is sorely missing from this game. But I do not want that from white mage, those are two very different class fantasies.

[KisaiTenshi]

The goal is to break up the 1-1-1-1 spam without significantly changing the total damage delivered over the course of an encounter.

An easy way to do that is to simply take the existing DoT; reduce its duration to, say, 12sec; and adjust its potency accordingly.

On SGE, you could then also reduce the cooldown on Phlegma from 40sec to 20sec and adjust its potency accordingly.

On WHM, you could then also give it "Water Splash", a spell (GCD) on a 15sec cooldown that's a mere 20 more potency than Glare.

Etc. etc.

At this point, relatively small changes would go a long ways.

Putting party play aside, solo content is why the potencies are what they are. If we have two GCD DPS buttons but they take longer to cast than a single DPS button, then the solo content just turns into a drag that takes twice as long. I think we all underestimate this.

Something has to be done, but a change to encounter design is where it has to come from, until they actually make the solo content "less of an endurance run to a tank/healer". I would love to see some actual SE telemetry on how they decide the potency of healer DPS in regards to solo content. Party content, is designed without the healer contributing any DPS. So that 8 percent increase in potency to me means that that Zenos fight should take 8 percent less time. That change is absolutely negligible to party content when DPS casters get like 20% increases.

[AmiableApkallu]

Putting party play aside, solo content is why the potencies are what they are. If we have two GCD DPS buttons but they take longer to cast than a single DPS button, then the solo content just turns into a drag that takes twice as long. I think we all underestimate this.

I literally walked through how to break up 1-1-1-1 spam in a way that doesn't significantly change your damage output.

I'll take a stroll through the math for Phlegma to make that all a bit more concrete. Assume a 2.5sec GCD. That's 16 casts in 40 seconds.

• Current DT: 15 casts of Dosis III @ 360 Potency + 1 cast of Phlegma @ 600 Potency = 6000 Potency total.
• Hypothetical where the recast on Phlegma III is reduced to 20 seconds, and its potency is reduced to 480: 14 casts of Dosis III @ 360 Potency + 2 casts of Phlegma @ 480 Potency = 6000 Potency total.

Nothing changes about how long solo content takes, but there is ever-so-slightly less 1-1-1-1 spam.

[Iedarus]

Snip

I get it. The best way to go about it is to release GEO as a healer if WHM players want to keep the holy aesthetic...

...as well as removing the angel stuff from SCH.

[Iedarus]

Things like that also help when you want to avoid being turned to face a target on cast and disrupting your movement if the mechanics call for it. Art of War and Dyskrasia may be a DPS loss over Ruin 2 and Toxikon as mobility tools, but they're also a gain over not casting anything at all to keep moving where you're trying to go when something's close enough. Oschon or the Antlion come to mind.

Wow, why did I not think of this? I would just Ruin II but still sometimes eat the petrification. Let's keep this a secret from the skill expression police.

[KisaiTenshi]

I get it. The best way to go about it is to release GEO as a healer if WHM players want to keep the holy aesthetic...

...as well as removing the angel stuff from SCH.

Unfortunately Geomancy is part of the AST story, so we're not getting that ever at this rate.

Like maybe we can forgive SE if we let them reorganize the healers, all of them. Go back to Conjurer, make it evolve into Geomancy. Make White mage a level 30 starting job. I don't think you'd even have to edit the WHM lore since there is pretty much nothing White mage centric before level 30 or after level 50. Make AST a level 30 starting job, but kick the Geomancy story over to the GEO, and give the AST job story a "magical girl/boy" storyline to go with it. Make the WHM have all the Holy Angel stuff. Have Scholar double down on the military tactician, where the fairy is intricately part of the job. Maybe you can summon three fairies, and double down on it being "FAIRY" so when you get to the pixies in ShadowBringers they antagonize you for having a fairy companion and not a pixie, so you get a pixie glam for the fairy. The scholar would have the option of "heal", "shield" or/and "buff" fairies to deploy. Deploying more than one fairy increases GCD time, but otherwise shouldn't change anything.

Like that's just what I would think of if they wanted to redo all of it to make sense. Because clearly the overlap is confusing to the developers in more than one way that they quite literately forgot that the fairy is not an angel with Seraph. That would have made sense to have on the white mage, but the white mage isn't a fairy healer.

[Senhime]

I can't speak for SCH but for SGE and AST they could just let both stance dance akin to what Eukrasia does for SGE atm. Even apply it to WHM (like the olden days with Cleric Stance) which would not only reduce button bloat but let the devs make them more dynamic and reactive while adding 1-2 more DPS buttons.

It is quite obvious that AST (RIP) was a beta job since you weren't allowed to stance dance in combat with the later sects being turned into what Eukrasia is more or less. The PVP combo system/added in DT could also fix a few of these issues but that's more of a naysayer thing who praise button bloat as complexity and "feel good" muscle memory.

[Chajii]

What I'm talking about is the "1-1-1-1" spam and players seemingly want a second button for a rotation, but what they don't realize is that either:
1) we lose the potency of both. So if an existing thing like Glare III (pot 330) is what we have, then the result is like Glare III (pot 190 ) + Stone VI (pot 140), the result being the same damage, but now it takes longer to do so.
2) we lose the DoT potency, so two dots would result in Dia going down to 35 potency and the Aero/Water Dot also being 35

[…]

Hence my argument that "extra DPS buttons" aren't going to translate to "more DPS". It will if anything translate to less, as the recast time between two lesser-potency DPS will be collectively more. I'd rather have more DoT's, but I know what will happen, the two DoT's will have less damage collectively than the single DoT had before.

Sorry if I wasn't being clear, I only want "extra DPS buttons" but never "more DPS", I am willing to have the potency of Broil lowered to compensate for the additional DoTs. The point of it is to have less 1-1-1-1 spam periods, it would make it be from 2-1-1-1-1-......-1-2-1-1-1-... into 3-2-1-1-1-...-1-3-1-1-1-1-2-...-1-1-3-1-... with "2" being the current DoT we have and "3" could be an extra DoT maybe with cast time and shorter duration to break things up.

To recap, I have no issue with how my total damage output is, I am completely fine with having potency adjusted to compensate for extra DPS buttons, I only want "extra DPS buttons", I do NOT want "extra DPS" or I would go play a real DPS, I hope this clears things up.


In regards to "1) we lose the potency of both...", I don't see how if both of them were GCD spells (seeing how you claim it would take longer), why there would be a need to lose potency of anything? Please let me know if I am missing something, thank you.

[EusisLandale]

Wow, why did I not think of this? I would just Ruin II but still sometimes eat the petrification. Let's keep this a secret from the skill expression police.

Yeah, petrification stuff is another time I end up doing that. Any time I see the eye in a new encounter, or one I haven't been to in ages, I just turn immediately and start spamming the aoe instead until I learn the safe last second turn timing.

[Kyanari]

AoW and Holy cannot be targeted AOEs. Don't forget that we have healers who target the tanks for target assist and heals while spamming AOEs. I didn't have this problem with Gravity or Toxikon and Phlegma because of target assist macro.

Also, is it just me wanting restore MP + reduce CD on Aetherflow + faerie gauge increase from Energy Drain like how it was in StB?