#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Tigore]

@ ForsakenRoe

I suppose I was granting Kohashi the benefit of the doubt just in case he does have an interesting idea. The Glare spell being changed to borrow the pseudo combos of PCT and VPR might be something, but I would have to have more context for where it is leading to. If I had to guess, it would probably have to be a new class like a Chemist or so.

Most of first talent tree versions from Warcraft have usually been an illusion of choice from my experience. It looks like 30 - 61 on paper or so, but the damage increasing and consistent defence nodes definitely reduce the amount of calculated choices. There were even certain expansion times where some class specs had only 1 cookie cutter template that was correct (cough Enhancement Shaman cough). When those trees did have some choice, it was usually just a few points to put into a node or 2. I found the talent systems that had something like 5 - 6 sets of 3 choices to have a bit more choice. Although it wasn't by much because it generally came down to passives for soloing vs. cooldowns for dungeons and raids.

An example from what I could remember would be for a Brewmaster Tank Monk to choose between self heals from using their Brew Skills (Gai Plin's Imperial Brew) or another effect that increases haste even further when their delay stagger DoT is yellow to red (High Tolerance). The first one was obviously for soloing with the other one for dungeons with a healer present. Solo mobs could usually only get me to low green levels for the stagger DoT, so ... The current talent tree allows you to have both now, but I see recommendations of only 1 point in High Tolerance if you need to be more defensive in dungeons. The solo one says not to go into High Tolerance or Ox Stance at all likely due to green stagger DoTs again.

Your ideas do remind me of when Warcraft made the Glyph system during the earlier expansion times. The effects do look nice from what you were brainstorming. Not sure why some were still of the mindset of the highest DPS glyphs, but the others saying the increased defensive benefits are not needed yet are probably right. We would likely need a touch more average encounter damage to make them more worth it. Which I understand you are working on that for suggestions already.

It would also be nice if there is more materia choice for what we would want. Probably the main thing they may have to do is to slightly nerf the Critical Chance one and slightly buff DH and Det since we already have good clear times for the dungeons from my impressions. Tenacity I have heard from my Savage friend that it's at least not so terrible now. Piety is still garbage though and would likely need a substantial healing boost effect on it paired with higher encounter damage again >.> Skill Speed and Spell Speed would be ... hard to come up with a proper idea for. DoTs have been gutted from DPS so much for that portion to not really be worth it. Cooldown reductions would introduce drifting rotations away from the 2 min meta burst ... All I got for an idea is to madly increase auto attack speeds for Skill Speed, slightly reduce spell casting time and potentially mana cost more for Spell Speed and reduce a little on GCD recasts and skill animation time for both.

[ForsakenRoe]

Materia/Substats

Chemist might be the perfect candidate for a 10 button design, all things considered. You might be onto something there. NIN turns 7 effects into 4 buttons (and later 9 effects into 5 buttons with the addition of Hyosho and Goka), so something like that on a Healer would be an incredibly hotbar-space-efficient design. You could have 6 buttons for the basic stuff (Cure, Medica, attack buttons for a simple rotation, etc), and then the 3 reagent and the button woudl allow you to have like, 7 different healing/mitigation effects to mirror what WHM does with Lilies, SGE does with Addersgall, etc. So 123 might be 'AOE heal', 321 might be 'AOE Mit tool', 21 might be 'AOE Shields', one of the combos could be the Raise button, etc.

The main issues for Healers in particular when it comes to substats are like, every stat has a problem of some kind. Crit is two stats in one (Crit Rate and Crit Multiplier strength), so it doubledips its scaling effect. Direct Hit is not on gear natively, and therefore increasing our Direct Hit from 'you can't do one' to 'you can' is a massively impactful jump in damage. Determination is probably the most 'acceptable' in terms of balance, because it doesn't really do anything wrong, on account of it not really trying to do anything at all, it's just 'numbers go up' as a stat. Piety doesn't affect our damage at all, and in a game design where A: the healers are designed to be able to function even with base levels of Piety, and B: there's so much focus on maximizing our damage, the Piety substat's window of effectiveness falls off almost immediately, and we never want any on our BIS gear. This could be addressed somewhat by making Piety scale our damage, similarly to how Tenacity scales our damage as a Tank. If it were up to me, I'd make PIE and TEN scale at the rate that DET does, and then delete DET. Then we'd have a Substat that is unique to each role: PIE for Healer, TEN for Tank, DHIT for DPS. And Crit would be split into Rate and Strength so it's not so all-encompassing and/or clearly stronger than the other stats

SpellSpeed's main issue for Healers, I believe, is not the 2min meta that causes problems for the DPS jobs, who have actual rotations to align. Instead, I think it's 'we cannot sustain the extra GCDs burdening our MP pool, and so it's more efficient to use a damage stat like Crit/DHIT, instead of using SpS and then having to supplement it with 'dead stat' Piety to sustain the extra MP cost'. SE accidentally stumbled onto the EW AST design, where ASTs had far too much MP coming in via Astrodyne's Refresh effect, and so AST's BIS actually wanted to use SpS in far larger amounts than other healers, because they couldn't spend the extra MP fast enough. So, I think SpS could be made better, without touching it at all (or much), instead buffing it by making Piety more attractive as a stat (eg by giving it damage scaling) due to the two stats' inherent synergy. Then you'd create a potential choice for the player: Piety/SpS as a more 'consistent output' build, or Crit/DHIT as a build with more variance, but a slightly higher maximum

I think SpS would get some especially interesting use cases if either A: basic spells didn't cost MP (eg, the SGE design I've gone on about before), or B: some aspect of the Job, affected by SpS, builds some kind of resource (eg, the SGE design). For example, if SpS were to scale the speed at which a resource like Lilies or Addersgall replenishes, it'd mean more uses of those spenders. But Addersgall spenders generate 700MP, and Lilies are effectively a 'this costs zero MP' GCD, so by doing so, the extra MP costs incurred from getting bonus GCDs (because you cast faster) are slightly offset by getting additional MP economy sources within the rotation. And if the basic spells don't cost any MP at all in a hypothetical healer design, then there's zero 'limitations' on how much SpS is safe to stack, and if I cobble together a PIE/SPS focused set in Etro, you could hypothetically end up with a GCD speed of like, 2.28 (or 1.82 under Presence of Mind)

[Lorika]

@Tigore
A build system is the worst thing that can happen to a MMO. While it promise versatibility and flexibility, in fact it was proven numerous time that, in the end, only a couple of meta Build would work for each class.
Thoses meta Build creating gate keeping in all kind of content.
Some game are heavily affected by this gate keeping.

@ForasakenRoe
The actual Materia system "doesn't work".
Because the substat need a complete rework.

[Shurrikhan]

Build diversity "doesn't work" only if (A) there is a set best composition for a different encounter, (B) you ignore all play outside of the best comp, (C) acknowledge only the build diversity per comp per encounter (e.g., even if another could is best in any other context, you still count that as only one build "seeing use"), and (D) the imbalance between the best comp and others are great enough to devalue other forms of customization-based optimization.

To be clear, I'm no advocate of expensive customization systems and would be hesitant to recommend XIV add any beyond the jobs themselves, but you're making a fundamental conclusion out of a singular circumstance, whatever its frequency, all while ignoring the main reason customization of any sort (be it job choice or talent choice) exists.

Those who would simply look up a general purpose build aren't those such customization is for, but to call customization a waste for that reason makes no more sense than to call the existence of any other job a waste because some people play only one or having more than a single two jobs each for Tanks, Healers, Melee, and Ranged a waste because only a limited number each would be optimal (or any more than 1 each a waste if not for Limit Gauge debuffs). And those who simply look up the "meta" build to be used acontextually are not only similarly opting out of engaging with the given options but usually fair worse than those who pick something less "meta" but makes sense for the actual level and stage of play among them and their party.

[Lorika]

Ok i will be more clear.
Build system doesn't work in MMO because : all the MMO, without exception, using the build system have heavy unbalance problem... Thus, creating only a couple of optimized and viable Build per class, thus leading to gate keeping.

In the end, the vast majority of people are playing the same few meta build.... Which just render the build system useless.

[Shurrikhan]

Let's take WoW as the obvious example here. And will take that single class example to start. Despite the ability to nigh-instantly import meta builds, going by the likes of archon, u.gg, etc., Warriors see more than 30 builds played across raid, and about as many again played each across M+ and PvP. The degree of difference and the slope of spread in popularity vary, of course, but let's not forget that these are solely among logged ("parsehead") runs even then. They're far from doing this for the kicks or "uniqueness" points.

You can call it an annoyance that different fights reward certain extra capabilities above progress, causing shifts in a spec's "most optimal" build. Similarly, you could be annoyed that, for a particular favorite spec, your favorite playstyle's build would fall 1.3% behind another you find less engaging. But it's far from one build per spec or even per content type.

Now, is all that worth the cost to implement and balance those choices, imo? No, generally not. But failure isn't an inevitability.

[Kohashi]

@Kohashi

What I am saying is that every Healer performs the same purpose but the difference lies in how. The more healers there are the more overlapping there will be especially in this game where various constraints severely limit stuff (rotations, drifts, weaving, server..etc).

For example, a healer here would never be able to grant Spell/Skill-casting reduction due to how rotations work in this game while in theory the faster you cast spells/skills the greater the damage is no?

As for my top-of-the-head idea with the color change, it is persistent, it doesn't expire and while it looks familiar, the PCT spell is only visual, a condensed 1-2-3 if you will. It has limited intractability and it doesn't transform all of the spells or how they perform. That role is limited to Stary Muse and directly tied to the burst phase.

@ForsakenRoe

I mean it is subjective what others (Tigore) think and saying it's a good way to solve an existing problem. And let's say... your suggestion is viable, the fact you need people to play perfectly already puts you at a loss. Yes, some stuff does overlap and yes you do have an abundance of spells that provide the same thing but I do think they exist to accommodate all levels of skill and execution.

As for the innovation, it is directly tied that you simply do the exact thing SE already does. It has nothing extra or new. For example, your shield is a worse version of Divine Caress since that gives a shield + regen while yours only gives a shield.

As for the color change, is just-> Glare hit-> change color-> persistent. Want to change? Mechanics coming? Can I dps? Does anyone need heal/rez?-> Glare again. (It can function as a "stance" change since you seem to be into that idea)

As for the talent tree, yes I didn't mention it however I didn't limit you or explicitly say you cannot use it. The only major constraint I provided you with was that the end result should be 10 spells. How it plays, what the spells do and how was completely up to you. You just assumed there was no talent tree involved.

As for bringing into discussion what Lucrecia did is just a very poor argument because those people not only have extensive knowledge in raiding at the top level, they also have mastery over the classes but above all coordination.
Do you really think they went in there and were like.. hey guys.. let's go CNJ + sch, 1 pull, 1 kill. The average Joe will NEVER be able to pull that. Can it be done? Well duh!!, can 99.99% of the player base do it? Hell no! Do you even want the 0.001% to become a staple in any content, sure, if you want to kill off the game?

As for my idea, it's just a random idea I had in the spur of the moment. Nothing planned to a T because while I do think class design can improve some people give SE a lot more shit than they should and they don't respect the depth of how the classes have been planned. This is in fact the entire purpose of the debate with you.

Anyway, I digress..

[Absurdity]

What I am saying is that every Healer performs the same purpose but the difference lies in how. The more healers there are the more overlapping there will be especially in this game where various constraints severely limit stuff (rotations, drifts, weaving, server..etc).

For example, a healer here would never be able to grant Spell/Skill-casting reduction due to how rotations work in this game while in theory the faster you cast spells/skills the greater the damage is no?

Except we had that, both in Selene's Fey Wind and Astro's Arrow card.

What you're doing here is assuming that because right now everything revolves around static rotations and fixed burst windows that we can't have haste buffs.


These restrictions aren't some kind of immutable characteristic of the game, they're self-imposed by the developers since Endwalker and didn't even exist for the longest time.

[Kohashi]

Except we had that, both in Selene's Fey Wind and Astro's Arrow card.

What you're doing here is assuming that because right now everything revolves around static rotations and fixed burst windows that we can't have haste buffs.


These restrictions aren't some kind of immutable characteristic of the game, they're self-imposed by the developers since Endwalker and didn't even exist for the longest time.

Fair enough but if you want to completely move away from that system, the 2.5s and weave philosophy SE might have to go back to the roots and make a different Engine plus completely re-design how every system works and interacts with each other.

Even if you dismantle the synchronized Burst meta some spells will still have a prior system within the class and providing a spell/skill speed will skew the entire rotation. I personally do love the idea of such a buff and many more. Like for example I would love to see a Chrono Healer that would manipulate the time.

For example a spell. Rewind - rewinds the party HP to 5s ago. Used-> let's say after a major mechanic and it will heal back to what those previous values were. (also imagine somebody low HP-> gets healed-> Rewind happens-> back to low HP-> hahaha )

Fast Forward -> Provides a 10% Spell/skill speed reduction Or flat.. I am undecided...LOL.

[Tigore]

If we do look at the competitor Warcraft, Haste functions better there. They even have an OP 30% Haste buff window provided from Bloodlust / Heroism / Time Warp. Although they handle party DPS buffs differently to make it possible. If there are some additional changes in the latest two expansions that change this a bit, apologies for missing them.

The main difference is the buffs are essentially apply and forget for 30 minutes to an hour. They are weaker versions of our FF14 buffs that are persistent for every moment. Two classes that provide the same type of buff do not stack either and just overwrite each other. In a way, they function like our buffs that are provided by having a certain role in the party (Eg. 1% all stats if a Physical Range is present = Blessing of Kings for WoW Paladin). The only other buff window I remember would be DPS potions and those can be independent for everyone too. As a result, you can drift away from other people's burst all you want and it would be okay in most cases. As long as everyone at least capitalizes on the 30% Haste window first. The debuff cooldown is so long that you usually expect just one per encounter.

If we translate this to FF14, we would either have to remove the burst party buffs like Battle Litany or Trick Attack or purposely desync their cooldown timers. The former would be way easier to do since a 1 minute timer still meshes well with 2 minutes. Other than that, reducing cooldown timers from Haste would be bad with what we got here.