Job Concept: Green Mage

[Tulzscha]

Job Title changed from Green Mage to Witch Doctor

With SMN losing its dots come Endwalker I've been wondering what a new dot-based caster could look like in FFXIV. This is one such idea.

Google Sheets Link: FFXIV Witch Doctor Concept

Update 12-19: Changed name of job from Green Mage to Witch Doctor.

Update 11-10: Added rough potencies. Aiming for total potency/second to be close to RDM since it brings similar utility.

Here's the short version:

• The Witch Doctor is a magical dps job masquerading as a healer and specializing in the application, alteration, transfer and sometimes removal of a variety of debilitating ailments. While they're certainly capable of helping as well as harming they tend to follow the creed, "Let no good tragedy go to waste."

• This job uses 3 resources: MP (mostly for healing and such), Soul Essence (starts at 0 and caps at 5), and Anima (starts at 0 and caps at 100).

• It has 3 dots that only cost a bit of mana and one additional dot for each special resource for a total of 5 dots.

• Epidemic is an important trait that gives each of your dots a different special effect when an enemy with any of your dots applied dies. To aid in this the job has a couple ways to kill an enemy quickly including a Death spell and for situations where you can't simply kill an enemy Epidemic can be triggered a couple ways other than having enemies die.

• There is a "pet" which you can use for multi-dotting (to keep single target fights interesting) and dot spreading - you put your dots on it and it transfers the damage that would be dealt to it to an enemy. Or you can blow it up to trigger Epidemic effects.

• Weapon: Toli (shamanic mirrors). These are two-sided talismans with a convex surface for repelling harmful magic and a decorated or concave side for using your own magic and focusing it on something. In FFXIV I imagine there being a number of different sized mirrors floating around the player representing the variety of things they can do, different weapons would have differently shaped and styled mirrors.

• Icon: A snake, representing the duality of lethal venom with the potential for healing as well as the general untrustworthiness of the job as they can just as easily cure sickness as cause it.

DoTs and Epidemic

• Contagion: Your basic instant-cast dot with a ground-targeted aoe version for easy application. Its Epidemic effect spreads all dots that were on the thing that died onto nearby enemies with Contagion.

• Atrophy: Stronger dot with a short cast time and slightly shortened duration. Its Epidemic effect deals aoe burst damage.

• Osmose: Weak dot with a short cast time that generates MP. Its Epidemic effect grants 1 Soul Essence.

• Toxify: Ogcd dot, costs 1 Soul Essence. This one has a long duration. Each tick it gains a stack, 5 stacks can be removed by a different ability to gain 1 Soul Essence. So in essence each target with Toxify can grant you 1 Soul Essence every 15s. Its Epidemic effect generates MP.

• Scourge: Ogcd dot, costs 30 Anima. This one has a very short duration, is very strong, and multiple casts of it on one target add their damage into one big dot (no damage is lost or gained from doing this). Its Epidemic effect grants you a damage buff.

Resources

• MP: Generated by the ticks of one dot and the Epidemic effect of another. Spent primarily on defensive utility like damage reduction or healing.

• Soul Essence: This one's a bit weird. The Toxify dot costs 1 Soul Essence, lasts 50s and every time it ticks it gains a stack - these stacks do not increase damage but instead 5 of them can be removed by another ability called Detox which grants 1 Soul Essence. To get the initial Soul Essence to start Toxifying things there's a cooldown ability and an Epidemic effect that both grant the resource. Besides Toxify, Soul Essence can be used for aoe or single target burst damage for when things either don't live long enough to apply dots or if you have extra Soul Essence.

• Anima: This is generated solely by defensive utility and is spent on a single short duration dot called Scourge. Multiple casts of Scourge on a single target stack up and its Epidemic effect grants you a damage buff based on the number of Scourge stacks. This resource isn't used as frequently as the others, it's kind of like Bard's Soul Voice but not as all-or-nothing.

The "Pet"

• At any time you can instantly summon a Reflection of a target which will essentially act as a pet which you and only you can attack. You need a target to summon it in the first place.

• Upon summon the Reflection copies all dots on the target and while attached to an enemy it transfers 20% of damage that would be dealt to it onto that enemy. When that enemy dies or becomes untargetable the Reflection teleports to your side until you assign it to another target. While it's at your side you can still load it up with dots and you can farm Soul Essence by Detoxing it but it won't deal any damage until you give it a target - but since you need to summon it on an enemy you don't have to worry about crazy pre-pull shenanigans.

• You can interact with the Reflection in only a couple ways:

• First there are two separate abilities to transfer it to another target: one copies the dots from that target onto the Reflection and the other moves (does not copy) the dots from the Reflection onto the target. Why so complex? The ability that copies dots comes with a long cooldown (basically replacing the summon ability) and the other allows you to move the Reflection freely with no cooldown (and having dots on an enemy is almost always preferable to the Reflection which would only deal 20% of their damage). These two abilities are part of an endgame combo that abuses dot copying + refreshing and Epidemic.

• The second way to interact with the Reflection is to shatter it once every 90s. This is the only way to kill the Reflection and doing so triggers Epidemic for each dot on it.

Gameplay

Single Target: Pretty simple. First apply and maintain your dots on both the target and your Reflection. There are shortcuts to application in Outbreak (applies 3 primary dots to target) and the Reflection can copy dots off its target.

In order to get Toxify going you'll have to either use the 2m cd for Soul Essence or trigger the Epidemic of Osmose at lower lvls (involves either killing an enemy, using Bane, or Shattering your Reflection). Once it's going you Detox each target with Toxify every 15s for another Soul Essence. Since Toxify lasts a long time you'll mostly be dumping this Essence on burst spells but you want to make sure you don't run out of Essence completely as it can be tricky to obtain from zero.

While refreshing dots and managing Essence you're free to use your utility as you see fit, Barrier is basically free dmg reduction so there's no reason not to use it. At lvl 80 using this utility generates a new resource that lets you do more damage making this a dps role that requires a tiny bit of healer awareness to play optimally. Mainly you just want to put dmg reduction on someone (like the tank) before they take a bunch of damage; you can also heal but that takes gcds.

To spend the resource gained from using your utility you have one ability: Scourge is a special 5th dot that acts as a nuke, you don't aim for uptime with it. This is where the job gets complicated because the Epidemic of Scourge gives you a dmg buff (which you can spread to the rest of the group at lvl 90) and against bosses there are precious few ways to trigger Epidemic (Bane and Shatter, both have long-ish cds). Optimal play will involve pet juggling and abusing dot spread mechanics to keep Scourge floating around and getting its buff multiple times. At max lvl you should be able to maintain the buff for almost 30s every couple minutes.

AoE: At low lvls it's all about multi-dotting. As you gain lvls aoe will become more combo-oriented, it revolves heavily around Epidemic and there are a number of ways to trigger it with packs of mobs, all of which have cds so you'll be using a different tool to trigger Epidemic each pack. First there's Bane which just triggers Epidemic without killing anything, then Death which straight up kills a mob and refreshes Bane if successful, and finally Shattering your Reflection.

The Reflection is an interesting one because it's primarily a single target tool but what you can do is load it up with dots in between mobs and transfer those dots onto enemies to reduce ramp time, this can be done as much as you want. Or you can blow it up for aoe dmg + Epidemic triggers but that's on a cd.

Epidemic is how dots are spread (so long as all the mobs have Contagion which can be applied to an entire group at once) so after getting your tools to trigger it there should be little to no multidotting. There's also no aoe filler spell, once dots are going there's only Necrosis for more aoe which costs Soul Essence - with lots of mobs that's pretty easy to get.

Additional Thoughts

All this nonsense likely looks complicated as hell at first glance, I've been thinking about this job for weeks so it's not very complex to me. Most jobs in FF take some getting used to.

I've also played dot classes in various mmos for years, I find them intriguing. In many cases damage over time is strictly worse than burst damage and in the mmo landscape it has a lot of problems: It takes more effort, it can't deal with priority mobs, it can be completely removed in PvP, it lacks the excitement of big hits, it can be very boring with one enemy, it can be frustratingly overwhelming with too many enemies. I enjoy thinking of ways to overcome these downsides and that's what I tried to do here.

The Reflection mechanic is very much a way to keep single target interesting. Dot classes usually feel best with 2 or 3 targets, this job is always guaranteed at least two.

Multidotting large packs again and again can get very annoying even for someone who likes dots so some kind of spread mechanic helps a lot but if it's too easy then the job gets boring again. With FFXIV in particular multidotting takes forever and feels pretty bad if it takes more than a gcd per mob so this design has quite a bit of spreading capability. But it's not as simple as ShB SMN's Bane because SMN had a lot of other things going on while this job does not. Also since there are a lot of lvl-scaling activities in FFXIV you'll have a different number of tools to work with depending on your lvl so sometimes you'll do more multidotting and sometimes less which should keep it fun.

Finally, the fun factor of dots in general. Dots for me are most fun when there's snapshotting involved and I wanted to force more of that in this job but that would involve random procs and I want to avoid those because the only other dot job in the game as a crap ton of procs, so I tried something different. There's one buff in this job and it's tricky to get but with good sequencing you can get a lot out of it.

Outside of that I went heavier down the resource management path with some focus on utility because people who like dot jobs tend to like managing stuff like a juggling act. So in addition to dot timers there's Toxify stacks + Soul Essence and mana + Anima which requires playing a bit like a healer to get the most out of. None of these are complicated on their own but everything together should hopefully be enough stuff to think about to keep it fun.