My Take on Fixing the Healers

[ty_taurus]

Wanted to remove this.

[Aurturia]

I dont think combos are the way to fix sch dps, also at a glance I'm pretty sure you have well over 30 skills there even when accounting for the direct upgrades and and the faerie spells switching themselves. Personally as a former sch the thing I want back most for dps is my dots, the bane explosion is just infinitely more satisfying then the ground slap that is AoW

[ItMe]

In your doc you say

"The Goal: The point of this design is to make the WHM a healer who spends about an equal amount of time healing as they do DPSing. To do that, they have been made more spell focused, meaning you will have less time to cast direct DPS spells, but also that you'll actively want to prioritize healing over DPS at different points to nourish the Blood Lily as frequently as possible."

I'm not sure your design accomplishes this goal when how much time you spend healing vs how much "downtime" you have is more dependent on fight design than job design.

Also, maybe I just missed it, but I'm not sure I understand how AST's cards adjust.
How does it/do you pick which card effect is activated?

[Semirhage]

"you will have less time to cast direct DPS spells, but also that you'll actively want to prioritize healing over DPS at different points to nourish the Blood Lily as frequently as possible."

Mmmmm. I know what you're going for here, and I think this falls into the same trap that a lot of WHM design since the introduction of lilies. It's a reward for healing volume, rather than accuracy. In other words, it's a reward for Cure spamming instead of careful usage of your spells.

Healing design is really hard that way. It's tough to reward the player in a way that encourages skilled/efficient kit usage. Because the "correct" skill to use in a scenario isn't based on a set rotation like a DPS's abilities are.

Case in point: I finally bit the bullet and leveled WHM this expansion. I'm still not sold on the lilies. Their design encourages you to blow them ASAP in dungeon pulls because the damage they do is worth the GCDs spent even if you overheal people. On the other hand, in boss rooms, you ignore them as long as possible because they're wasted time compared to off-GCDs.

I think you'd be hard pressed to design damage/utility/whatever locked behind "amount of healing spells cast" that -doesn't- end up having this issue.

[ty_taurus]

The thing about the lilies now is that you're not obligated to use them in battles because the reward of Afflatus Misery is less than the reward of just casting Glare 4 times. This is because Glare's current potency is 300 vs Afflatus Misery's 900, so the GCD cost of getting to Afflatus misery is 0 + 0 + 0 + 900 against the boss whereas Glare is 300 + 300 + 300 + 300.

The big thing about that here is Glare getting reduced to a potency of 230. 230x4 is 920, but shortly after that growth to Glare do you get Afflatus Agony which is 1200 potency (the White Mage Xenoglossy), so in battles you'll want to actively prioritize Lily usage over using Glare whenever you have Lilies because each cast of Afflatus Solace/Rapture is essentially a 300 DPS contribution over Glare's 230 so long as you aren't using Lilies when the Blood Lily has bloomed.

I suppose a could small details we could include is a change to Afflatus Solace/Rapture as well as the new concepts for Renew and Gospel to denote that they only nourish the Blood Lily while in-combat, or can only be used in combat so that you don't accidentally burn Lilies out of combat (I'm looking at you AST cards). There's also the possibility of adding the caveat that they only work if HP has been recovered and not if no HP has been recovered.

There's a valid argument in these kind of builds ultimately rely on more damage to be taken, but the big thing with this White Mage is the change in dynamic of GCD vs OGCD healing. Tetragrammaton is now a spell, for example, so your only way to heal off the global cooldown is through Asylum, Assize, and Benediction. Everything else will eat a GCD use, so even with the existing content in the game, you'd still be spending less GCDs on DPS, even if only slightly.

[Kiarin]

What about Scholars who don't want to be a green DPS, but a prevention/shielding healer with rather normal DPS? Why take away Excog, one of the few remaining skills that directly correspond to SCH's identity?

That being said, a lot of ideas are interesting. Which shows, again and again, how much potential SCH holds, and how wasted it is now =_=.

[ty_taurus]

What about Scholars who don't want to be a green DPS, but a prevention/shielding healer with rather normal DPS? Why take away Excog, one of the few remaining skills that directly correspond to SCH's identity?

That being said, a lot of ideas are interesting. Which shows, again and again, how much potential SCH holds, and how wasted it is now =_=.

I personally think it's important that we consider having healers that cater to the different playstyles ranging from full offensive to full supportive because there's such a divide in the healer community with some healers wanting to be heavy DPS healers while others want to do little-to-no DPSing at all. The current strategy of just quietly say nothing on the topic, make healer DPS an expectation by design, and just give them boring and monotonous DPS tools isn't sitting well with the community. In order to do this though, we ultimately do need to decide on who's doing what, and there are a number of reasons why it makes sense for the Scholar to be that DPS heavy healer.

- Not only was the Scholar originally designed to be a kind of Green DPS from it's conception, but it's also the only healer that starts as a DPS and changes to a healer at level 30.
- Shielding is mechanically supportive to a DPS playstyle by creating barriers that make it so that you don't need to heal in the first place.

As for Excog. I had a feeling that moving it to AST would be a sour spot. The only real reason I went with this was because I wanted to lean into AST's delay healing aspects and found that it made sense. It's ultimately not the centerpiece of either skillset though, so if people genuinely felt it belongs on the Scholar more, I wouldn't change that and rework it into a faerie action to match the rest of the fey actions being your OGCD healing tools.

[ItMe]

You keep saying Green DPS. What does that mean?
IIRC the Green Mage was an evolution of the White Mage, but it focused on buffs/debuffs and had 0 damage dealing spells
I'm having a hard time understanding how SCH was designed as "green DPS."

[Videra]

You keep saying Green DPS. What does that mean?
IIRC the Green Mage was an evolution of the White Mage, but it focused on buffs/debuffs and had 0 damage dealing spells
I'm having a hard time understanding how SCH was designed as "green DPS."

Scholar's original (and widely considered best) incarnations in 2.0 and 3.0 heavily focused on dancing in and out of cleric stance while maintaining your dots and healing as necessary. It was a much more complex beast than it is today, and I'd honestly prefer they just revert wholesale to that playstyle. That said, most of us do love excog. That should stay. It's one of the only changes to SCH I've actually liked over the course of SB and ShB lmao.

[Kabooa]

The thing about the lilies now is that you're not obligated to use them in battles because the reward of Afflatus Misery is less than the reward of just casting Glare 4 times. This is because Glare's current potency is 300 vs Afflatus Misery's 900, so the GCD cost of getting to Afflatus misery is 0 + 0 + 0 + 900 against the boss whereas Glare is 300 + 300 + 300 + 300.

You're thinking about this wrong.

Afflatus only brings in a deficit if you don't require GCD healing and it isn't used during a transition.

Even speedruns make healthy use of Afflatus healing without massive overhealing.