A summary of healer issues

[ty_taurus]

I'm assuming the potency scales off of healer potency and not the character receiving the potency. The GCD buffs would also need potential to scale as many DoTs as a SCH has in potency. Assuming no one missed GCDs, this can fix the issue of balance. Assuming SCH gets their DoTs for debuff, AST does the opposite - good for job identity. Time Dilation being 10 second cooldown is also fair and can be used on defensive utility.

Yeah, the attack would technically be coming from you but it would be triggered by other players. I think that's the best way to handle it balance-wise. Having it scale off the target means you're bias toward DPS players, and that's probably not healthy for encouraging you to use your card effects on the best target. The added benefit of Time Dilation as a GCD action and allows you to always have a card effect in play so you're never in a bind where no one has card effects and Draw is on cooldown so you have to Malefic if you don't have time to heal. It's possibly you could let your cards fall off and find yourself in this situation, but it would just mean AST would be a bit more technical, which I think is fair considering this design would be about making them as passive as possible. There's the risk that a passive healer is a low-skill healer, but elements like this help make it so that you have to work to stay passively applying your flat potency buffs to allies.

Though, I'm having a bit of a tough time understanding what how you would want it dynamically applied. From what I understand, ASTs won't be spamming it so... the AST won't be spamming malefic, but mixing Malefic with this GCD buff? Or is there multiple GCD buffs? Or is buffing going to be a complex thing? Sounds tricky to implement imo.

It probably would be tricky, and like I said, it would probably get written out and then thrown to the wolves, figuratively speaking. There would be a lot of discussion points regarding this concept, and we would probably be prototyping it aggressively in private servers. Basically, though, what makes it dynamic is a bit about what we mentioned. Your best DPS comes from this healing buff that you can apply only to allies with card effects on them, so we ideally want to create a "rotation" of healing and shielding perhaps that allows the AST to keep their buff up, possibly on multiple allies at times like after Sleeve Draw and keeping up defensive buffs with Time Dilation. There would probably be moments where there's nothing you can do to keep this cycle going, which would be the best time to apply Combust, use GCD healing, and perform a cast or 2 of Malefic if nothing else is needed, but ideally this would be minimized as much as possible without making the build unforgiving for when you need to stop and GCD heal.

The are a couple of unknowns when giving AST back it's Time Mage identity though - exactly how much of it is it getting back, and what is the job development direction going to take from that point forward? ASTs would always want this buff up. Naturally, upkeeping a defensive buff on the tank is key so it would be best to Time Dilate onto the tank. However, both SCH and WHM have clear solutions to outgoing raidwide damage. ASTs as a Time Mage does not. How much burst healing will ASTs trade for Time extension abilities (looking at Time Extended AoE Stun Celestial Opposition vs AoE Heal Celestial Opposition)? I'm not saying it would be a bad thing, but ShB made it clear that certain fights require a lot of AoE burst healing. A Time Mage with only regen ticks cannot achieve that level unless they took a more mitigative stance with defense buffs being applied to everyone nearby. It's a difference in healing potential & healing style for sure and sounds a bit more hectic for balance and future content depending on how the job proceed forwards. Just food for thought.

What about healing or mitigation tools that slow down the rate at which you actually receive damage so that your regens can keep up? You could have something that mitigates the damage you receive by, say, 90%... but the 90% that you don't take is instead spread out in the form of a DoT over 9 seconds, or so. These are all just random numbers, so adjustments can be made of course, but if the issue is that they can't burst heal... slowing down or dividing up burst damage is both a thematic and interesting solution.

Alternating Crowns without consuming a card sounds good provided it has 2 charges in case you can't Lord at the moment and Lord/Lady shares the cd in order to always get the CD up as soon as possible. That way you can depend on the oGCD heal without planning the next x CDs in advance.

That's a good point. Charges would make this version of Minor Arcana perfect. You both know when you're getting the Lady and can hold onto her for a few moments while you find the best time to use her. There are a lot of changes I don't expect to see regarding the healers that have been talked about, but this is one that I think isn't too unreasonable and makes a lot of sense. I really hope this shows up in 6.0