A summary of healer issues

[fulminating]

Does Chi Ten Jin count as a channelled ability? You're locked in place for the duration and possibly slightly before depending on how much you trust the servers.

[AnotherPerson]

Does Chi Ten Jin count as a channelled ability? You're locked in place for the duration and possibly slightly before depending on how much you trust the servers.

Yes, but not in the traditional sense. Ten Chi Jin also doesn't take into effect until you utilize the skills, but it can be seen as a way of channeling due to being locked in place and being unable to use any other skills other than what the "Channeled skill" provides as a result.

Another example of channeling is Leylines on BLM, but unlike Ten Chi Jin, Leylines isn't designed as a standalone channel ability. BLM is usually just casting at a 2.5 second GCD (excluding spell speed). After using leylines, Black mages are encouraged to continue "Channeling" their Fire IV rotation at level 60 for a flat 30 seconds within the small range of their circle as long as possible inside the leylines due to the lower cast time (a.k.a. soft-locked into place), but BLM can freely break off and move away from their leylines whenever possible and resume afterwards, giving it flexibility (and at higher levels, you can freely move between your leylines + get instant casts, giving the playstyle a lot more flexibility). BLM takes the whole channeling aspect as its foundational gameplay but on much shorter intervals.

The traditional standalone channeled abilities are skills like AST's Collective Unconscious. Collective Unconscious is not worth channeling over since you just need to snapshot the defensive buff + regen effect right before damage calculation. Any extra damage following that can be healed with Aspected Helios or other oGCD skills. The three cases of channeling Collective Unconscious:
1. To ensure everyone has been snapshotted with the buff. (Maybe 3 seconds longer in channeling for everyone to group up within range)
2. Continuously keep the defensive buff going because there's multiple instances of damage (ex: Euphrosyne 3rd boss phase transition) -- except at that point you have better healing skills at keeping players alive.
3. The supposed instance where you do want to channel is because channeling cost no MP and you're out of MP -- and this is definitely not the case for AST who has 3 potent sources of MP regeneration.

Not to mention, a standalone channeled ability can't do anything else but use that ability -- which often relegates it to a specific job in the toolkit. Again, in AST's case, if you want to channel it -- you can't be using any other skill or move to dodge mechanics, so the only time you channel is when there's a phase transition. Due to how overly abundant our healing toolkits are and how there's another specific "subrole" designed to work with mitigation (barrier healers), that's actually a huge negative to using a healing-channeled skill because there's so many other skills you can use together in the same duration to beat this channeled ability.

In casual play, damage is usually not high enough to warrant channeling Collective Unconscious -- not even mentioning all your other healing abilities, you have more value just using Aspected Helios or spamming Helios right after snapshotting the buff. In high-end play, DPS checks discourage channeling an ability that doesn't do damage if the damage doesn't outright kill you without needing the mitigation for a long period of time, but since you can't use your other healing skills or move either, it's also problematic to keeping people's HP up.

As a result, AST's Collective Unconscious use case is basically treated like Kerachole, just with a lower duration on the mitigation buff. In most cases, it's treated as an additional regen buff if you don't need the mitigation on snapshot to survive.