A summary of healer issues

[ForsakenRoe]

Isn’t he the guy who gave god cancer? A darkest dungeon occultist/mayuri/completely amoral and rather grim in execution healer would be amazing. I’m not necessarily convinced heal strength for gameplay downsides on others would be the direction to go, but certainly having heals with bone-cracking sound effects and wet slaps could be good. Maybe some kind of death protection similar to dying in sophia’s add phase?

Some (myself included) were on board with the idea of putting a new (well, not really, but way less done than the usual) spin on Necromancer as a healer, stealing life energy from enemies, giving it to allies, it makes sense because LB3 is 'you raise your whole team'. Necromancer as a caster would have, imo, been the most boring implementation possible, everyone does 'necromancer as a damage dealer'. 'Oh but the lore, necromancy is super taboo' yeh explain it as 'bad necromancers are perverting the life cycle, and you are part of a special group that brings peace to restless spirits so they can pass on and stop haunting places', problem solved. BLM is taboo, it almost ended the world at one point, but we're allowed to be one. DRK is taboo, but the first thing we do in Ishgard, not 10 minutes after being told 'dont make a scene' is kill 20 knights to stop an attempted rape. I don't see how there's some sort of 'line in the sand' on one specific job and how there's no possible way for the lore to be written that would allow for it to have 'the bad guys' and 'you' as using the same techniques, for different purposes. Hell, you summon voidsent with RPR, that's as taboo as it gets, but it's still a part of the game now

Now, I do like Sage from an aesthetic point, I watched some Kamen Rider, Gundam etc. Gameplay's not as 'there' as it could be though

FF14's channeled abilities are bad because they're not worth it. Making an ability channeled in this game is a downside/risk. You lock yourself in place, which is extra bad in a game where you have to move all the time. If you're going to attach a risk like that to something, you need to make it rewarding too. FF14's channeled abilities are all lower potency than just...using a regular GCD that isn't a pain in the butt to use. You fix this by designing it as an intuitive, rewarding ability commensurate with the added risks.

You have to move a lot more, a LOT more, in WOW, but they still manage to have channeled abilities. Mindflay's been a thing since forever, the reason it works is because it's the 'filler' spell, and the comparative power of each tick compared to other things is super low. If we had a healer that had a spell for it's filler that was 'channel a laserbeam at the enemy for 2.5 seconds, dealing 50p per 0.5s (total 250p damage), then when you have to move 1.5s of the way into the spell cast, you lose 2 ticks, for a total of just 100p lost. ATM if I did that on WHM, I lose a whole Glare cast basically, which is 310p. It'd just be a case of tuning it right if they were to do it. Channels can feel very impactful with good tuning though, look at Tranquility for example, massive raidwide healing on a long CD, but the channel feels good (despite locking you out of using other GCDs) because it heals so bloody much compared to anything else in the kit

No, the reason they don't want to do it for rotational abilities, they said at one point iirc. As far as I'm aware, the reason they never did them is that channeled spells mean you don't press anything while they channel, and they don't like the idea of 'press the button and sit there while the channel completes'. If you had a 5s channel, you'd have half the APM of any other caster as you let the channel complete. And if it were, eg, a 2.5s channel, I assume they'd look at it as 'well then lets just make it a regular cast time so we dont have to do engine work'