#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Alice_Rivers]

I use AST bubble all the time, just not for the heal, I put it up for the burst of mitigation. But I don't really think that's the fault of the ability rather than the encounter design, there's not enough sustain damage and if we had more instances things like the final M4 stack or that thing from M3 where AST and SGE bubbles in particular shine maybe we'd channel it for longer instead of just treating it like an oGCD mit.

[Tigore]

Yeah. I used that AST bubble for the mitigation too. I'm not saying channelled heals would never work. It's just that oGCD heals allow us to heal and deal damage at the same time. In order to compare with that, the channel would either have to buff the party with a damage buff, place a long lasting and juicy party damage reduction / shield up so you have more GCD DPS up time afterwards or deal damage to enemies at the same time as healing allies. Option 4 would be to remove some oGCDs from an existing healer or design a new healer with less of them, of course >.>.

Healers with more reliance on DoTs would be able to afford to use the channels more liberally with less loss on their GCDs. One might say SCH for that, but the class' Aether mechanic using oGCD heals may clash with adding channelled heals unless it does one of the three additional things I listed. It would run the risk of the channel being used right at the start of combat just for those buffs if that route is taken.

[Alice_Rivers]

They could also do some interation with the healer gauges, so if a sage decided to use a channeled heal then it adds to it's toxicon tokens, WHM grows it's blood lily, etc so that it stays damage neutral.

[Supersnow845]

Channeled healing or mitigation needs to be much much stronger than flashing it to make it worth it. Ironically despite how underpowered it is the best example of this is improvisation and another example is nocturnal collective unconsciousness. These two provide tangible benefits to continuing to channel them (improvisation stacks the shield nocturnal collective unconsciousness only applied the regen as long as you channeled it for) while diurnal collective and POA provide no difference between flashing them and channeling them because you only ever use them for one mechanic anyway (outside of downtime in which case it doesn’t even matter anyway)

As a really simple example if they did something like the first 3 seconds of POA was 5% mitigation then after that it jumped to 20% in certain circumstances it would actually be worth channeling it because the massively increased mitigation could save healer GCD’s later on (the same way casting spreadlo can be an rDPS gain for the raid)

That or a channeling system that a lot of MMO’s use for their healers or support casters (which we used to have in a form of mana shift) in which you can channel HP sharing, either sharing the HP of the entire raid or channeling the off tanks HP to the main tank. That type of channeling is always worth it because mechanics are designed around that sort of channeling

[LynxDubh]

I used to use Collective Unconscious on heavy dungeon pulls in HW/SB. The regen stacked with the others and you could use Time Dilation and Celestial Opposition to really get some hefty HoT numbers in Diurnal, then go into Gravity spam. It's always kinda been a skill you just flash to get the benefits, even way back then.

[Maltothoris]

The big difference however was that it depended on the server tick for whenever it wanted to apply Collective unconscious cause if you decided to press it pre 4.4, you may not even get the effect at all. However, with the changes of 4.4 to all those ground based aoes like Asylum, Soil, etc, Colletive got the benefit of you just needing to press it and it would immediately apply.

[ForsakenRoe]

Rather than 'channel' abilities, I think the more accurate comparison is how WOW's Evoker handles 'Empower' abilities. Press to start the cast, then press again to fire the spell at whatever 'empower' level you've charged up to.



Transplanting this concept onto FFXIV abilities, an example would be BLM's Flare. It could have 4 levels of empowerment, with the base cast (note: cast time, not recast) being very fast to get out and dealing, say, 240p, and each additional level of empowerment adds 20p more to the potency, so that the fully charged version is 300p. With sensible potency balancing, this would allow the player to play as they do now, aiming for the maximum empowerment, but A: allowing the player to cut the cast off as soon as it hits max empowerment level, rather than letting it auto-cast out (for Flare, this would be firing the cast at 3.2s of the castbar (example) instead of the current 3.5, saving 0.3s on each cast due to the Recast timer being shorter at 2.5), and more importantly IMO, B: allowing the player to recognize 'oh I'm not going to be able to get the full empowerment out of this Flare because the mob's about to die, I'll cut it off early and get 'most' of the damage from it, instead of losing the cast entirely'

Certain actions would feel really cool with that kind of system, IMO. Flare/Despair is the first example that comes to mind, but how about MCH tools? How about making Deathflare a GCD (potency buffed of course) and having that be one of these empowerment actions? What about SAM's Midare? VerFlare/Holy/Scorch? As long as the potency balancing of the 'reward per empowerment level' vs 'base potency of action' is sufficiently skewed towards the base potency (such that punishment of movement etc is reduced), I think there's quite a few actions that could support the system.

Maybe there could even be some slightly different actions, where it's not the final level of empowerment that's the best, but the one before it. For example, what if Midare was 660/670/680/670, such that getting the timing right and hitting the 3rd level was the 'sweet spot' for maximum damage, and over-cooking the charge reduces your damage back to level 2? (MH Greatsword style)


As for Channelled actions, I have an idea for a job: a Healer, where its GCDs are all channels (eg you pulse damage to an enemy, pulse healing around you), and it naturally has a GCD speed locked at 0.5s. Where WHM has 'Medica heals for 400p and you cast it once per 2.5s', this healer would be 'channel AOE healing for 80p every 0.5s', which totals up to the same 400p in the same 2.5s. The 0.5s GCD means that, should you need to move, you can instantly start a new channel as soon as you're finished moving. It'd be the most casual friendly job (because of how non-punishing movement is), and yet an absolute nightmare to optimize (because ANY movement screws your parse)

[Azurarok]

Closest thing to that concept's DNC's Improv, charging up stacks of a buff that changes the size of the barrier applied when Finish is pressed. It'd be neat to see stuff like that on ranged jobs including healers

[Tigore]

I could definitely see a spell cast empowerment of 3/4 bars working for Sam's Iajutsu skills. RDM I think would benefit from it the best with their final move Resolution after Scotch.

The BLM I was thinking they may need a revamp with Aetherial Manipulation since VPR and MNK pretty much "stole" it with better versions. Perhaps a move cast like the Warcraft Mages used to have from the Ice Floes talent. Currently, Shamans still should have that feature with their Spiritwalker's Grace. This would definitely help with the new healer idea of only using channels.

[CaptainLagbeard]

With the live letter coming up, I wonder how possible it could be to try to fill the chat during the presentation with healer strike messages as much as possible...