A summary of healer issues

[Semirhage]

Ray of Judgement, yeah. It's funny because I actually like that ability itself, but channeled abilities in FFXIV are bad. So all the theorycrafters and hardcores say, anyway. If we're going to "reimagine" it, why bother with it in the first place?

It's like you think people who actually know what they're talking about just make things up.

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.

[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'

[fulminating]

Could be an interesting way to experiment with downsides/tradeoffs for instant cast heals. You get x hp now but over then next y ticks some amount of it leaks away or whatever. Maybe draining a bit of ally hp and storing as a minion until needed too, kind of similar to excog where the heal's in stasis until conditions are met.

I don't see how there's some sort of 'line in the sand' on one specific job

If you want the cynical answer, it's "china's too valuable to risk alienating". Voidsent are not-quite-ghosts enough to be shoved under the rug, but necromancy would be difficult to localise.

[ForsakenRoe]

If you want the cynical answer, it's "china's too valuable to risk alienating". Voidsent are not-quite-ghosts enough to be shoved under the rug, but necromancy would be difficult to localise.

Then call it something different in China. It's not Paladin in all regions, in Japan it's Knight. So have it as Necromancer in EN, 'Necromancer, but written in Katakana' in JP, and something analogous but not directly named as such for China. Occultist or Exorcist or whatever. And also, Diablo's got Necro as a class and that gets sold in China, right? I know about the censorship of skeletons they do over there (Scholomance's skulls in WOW all getting changed to loaves of bread is peak stupid), but there's ways to deal with it that isn't just 'OK we can't do this specific job idea we have because China won't like it'

As for design, the idea (in my mind) would be moreso stuff like 'put debuff on enemy, anyone that hits that enemy lifesteals', and there'd be interplay with filling the gauge with damage, then spending that damage on healing skills. It's no different really from if Energy Drain was the generator, and you spent the Flows on healing exclusively, but the aesthetic would be different, because of the class identity, the VFX, etc, giving the 'feel' of 'steal enemy lifeforce and redirect it to allies'. 'Necromancy' is a very wide school of magic, and it is kinda annoying to me that most games just boil it down to 'summon a skellyboner to hit enemies for you'. If you think about it not as 'summon dead stuff' but 'manipulate the energies of life and death' it is vastly more creative room



Retweet to scare the CCP

[Renathras]

and wet slaps

Uh... o.O (I'm not thinking of any kind of innuendo, I'm just not sure what "wet slaps" in this context would be... like what kind of medical instrument or device makes "wet slaps"...?)

That said, yeah, Miyuri is one sick dude.

It's like you think people who actually know what they're talking about just make things up.

No. It's not like that in any way. But nice try.

More?

Okay: In order to make it where it's worth using - to the people that say it's bad - they'd have to make the potency really high. Then it couldn't be a channeled ability. If the potency is less than the GCD of Glare for a tick, it's bad to use. This means an ability that ramps up OR an ability that starts high and ramps down (people would just cancel it at the point the down-slope crossed the Glare damage line). That is, if you had an ability that started at 500 potency per sec and decreased every by 50 potency every second for 10 seconds, you'd terminate it early since the last bit would be lower damage than a Glare. On the other hand, if it ramped up, the end point would have to be really high to justify the risk of ending it early. Conversely, if it was level the entire time, every tick would have to have a normalized damage greater than Glare as well. In any other case, it just makes more sense to cast a Glare. And it has to be higher ENOUGH to justify the risk.

That is, if you make it do greater enough damage than Glare, it still has to be significant otherwise you'll say it's not worth the risk. So for example, 310 potency for a 2.5 sec GCD (Glare III) equates to 124 potency per second. This means that if the channeled spell did, say, 125 potency per 1 second (312.5), you'd appraise it as not worth using (the locked in place risk) over Glare or that it's not "rewarding" good use/the risk involved. But at the point where it DOES become a solid increase, it's now likely great enough to widen the gap between the floor and ceiling player wider than the Devs want.

"designing it as an intuitive, rewarding ability commensurate with the added risks", in other words. (Not to mention "intuitive" and "rewarding" are not precisely defined terms here...Misery is intuitive and rewarding to most people, but you seem not to agree.)

One thing I think COULD help is if a channeled ability was your main nuke spell. Like, if it was your go-to "spamnuke" and had no CD on it. Most channeled abilties in MMOs tend to have some CD. The closest ones to not that I can think of are some iterations of Arcane Missiles on WoW Arcane Mage had low recast or procs or something so they were up all the time, and Shadow Priest Mind Flay. But in this case, it IS your spam nuke, and you'd use a different ability instead when you needed to be more mobile. So take SCH, for example. Imagine Broil IV itself was the channeled damage attack. Something like deals 120 damage per second for 3 seconds, 3 sec GCD. Note this normalizes to 300 damage per 2.5 sec, so this is doing more damage than current Broil IV. Then you have Ruin 2 over here on the side as instant cast that does 220 damage. In this sense, Broil IV is the one you're trying to use every 3 seconds as your channeled ability nuke and Ruin 2 is the button you press when you need movement, since it does more damage than Broil IV for anything less than 1.83... seconds of channel. Granted, you might normalize it over 5 sec or something instead, but whatever. So maybe Broil IV would be "120 damage every second for 5 seconds, GCD 5 seconds, channeled, consumes 150 MP per second, action ends on movement".

Point is, it can work that way, but then you'd probably dislike it since it would be swapping one "spamnuke" for another. Though arguably a much higher skill level other - Ruin 2 would now HAVE to be used (other than Biolysis natural refreshes) for oGCD weaving, for example, and you'd be pressing half as many Broil IVs because each would last twice as long.

That said, it would raise the skill ceiling some... even for good players who know where to plant their feet, oGCD optimizing would become tighter. You'd want to maximize every Ruin 2 cast by finding times where you need two oGCDs, like burn an Energy Drain and then pre-cast a Whispering Dawn for damage happening in several seconds using the Ruin 2 window to move to the safe spot and then hard channeling Broil IV once you get there.

Yes, but not in the traditional sense.

This.

The only traditional sense channeled abilities in the game are, I believe, Passage of Arms, Collective Unconscious, and Flamethrower. Especially Flamethrower because it has some special code where the damage is applied every 1 sec instead of every ~3 sec server tick. I'm not sure how it's unique in that way, but it seems to be. Oh, and Aetherpact is channeled, I guess...by Eos, though, not by the SCH.

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,

I think it may be due to a lot of people thinking of Blood Mage for that. Not in the WoW (lore) sense for Blood Elves, but in the sense of Vanguard, Saga of Heroes. Apparently they had a class that worked as a sort of vampire healer, stealing health (damaging) enemies in various ways and spreading it as heals to either the mage or to their defensive target or party. People don't tend to think of that as Necromancer because it's not a Necromancer in the normal sense (no raising of undead thralls as minions and such, Raise aside).

Or imagine a WoW Warlock that did less damage but the health drain abilities it had healed party members as well as themselves. Something like that, anyway.

The problem is, FFXIV's combat system is, yet again, too rigid for this to really work. They'd just be regular heals with or Kardia that just had a different aesthetic. If SGE was renamed Blood Mage and Dosis to Drain Life, but worked exactly as it does today, one could argue it was a Blood Mage/vampire healer. But it would mechanically be the same thing.

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

I think that's fair. It's not for everyone, but I honestly enjoy it. Which is weird because I prefer healing to doing damage, but I think it's because I like the aesthetics and I like how it is brimming with oGCDs so I feel like I'm able to engage with them all the time (unlike SCH where I feel I have to use my AF on ED and am limited only to longer oGCDs). I like being able to actively and continuously shield allies with Karachole, which no other healer can do aside from SCH, and SCHs that do it are "bad" (using AF on Soil instead of ED). It is funny that the "heals by doing damage" healer appeals the most (in this group of us) to the person that likes doing damage the least. Funny how that worked out...

Agreed with it needing to be the core of the rotation, though, as I said above myself. Tranquility is one of my favorite buttons in MMO history. Did they make it where it's not just your party? I think it was originally raidwide, then they nerfed it to just be your party, which was lame.

[fulminating]

Uh... o.O (I'm not thinking of any kind of innuendo, I'm just not sure what "wet slaps" in this context would be... like what kind of medical instrument or device makes "wet slaps"...?)

I was imagining as if it were throwing lumps of flesh together. Not necessarily to the original owner either, just a quick functional fix with whatever’s lying around. It’s almost a shame corpses aren’t persistent or they could be used as a healing resource in dungeons at least.