A Change to Phoenix Downs

[ty_taurus]

One aspect about the ongoing healer debates is the need to keep the role easy and forgiving for casual and new players. In many ways, this need for easy-of-use has stifled the healers, but I believe there are ways that we can make healing more forgiving without needing to stifle their gameplay. In theory, creating more forgiveness elsewhere could help us push further back into healers having gameplay loops, essentially.

One thing unique to healers is that there's more pressure on them to understand mechanics and not die to them, as typically a healer dying can mean the party will eventually succumb to damage and fail. Recent tank changes have counteracted that by allowing the party to clear the fight without their healer more reliably, but I feel that's kind of an awful way to address that issue.

"If you fail, don't worry. The rest of the team will do the work for you and you can sit there and not play the game."

So I propose the following changes to Phoenix Downs:

1. Allow Phoenix Downs to be usable in combat with a cooldown of 180 seconds.
2. Allow players to carry multiple Phoenix Downs.
3. Award players Phoenix Downs for completing roulettes to ensure players always have at least a few off hand.
4. Add a new restriction to high-end duties that makes Phoenix Downs unusable and add this as a DF option alongside things like minimum ilvl and silence echo.

This change would relieve a lot of that pressure on healers, which in tern could hopefully placate some of this desire to handle healer players like infants from the game devs.

[Semirhage]

Major thumbs up. Why on earth Phoenix Downs are still unique items is completely baffling to me. It's like treasure maps. You can only gather one a day; why in the world are they one-per-inventory? Nonsense.

[DezereDawn]

Definitely can agree with this as an idea, Phoenix downs are an iconic ff item and it feels really weird to let them languish in obscurity here

[Enkidoh]

Definitely can agree with this as an idea, Phoenix downs are an iconic ff item and it feels really weird to let them languish in obscurity here

That's actually the reason why they're in the game but somewhat limited as I understand it - Yoshi considers them an iconic item for the FF series but is concerned about game balance and so that was the compromise to having them appear in the game.

I agree though that it would be nice to perhaps make them a little bit easier to use (such as being able to stack them), but I'm pretty confident to say that Yoshi probably won't be doing anything with them sadly.

[Nizzi]

Agree completely. Laying there dead watching everyone else slowly try to finish a fight, especially with tanks having the ability to sustain themselves nigh infinitely in normal mode content, is not fun. This would be a great change, and would make newer healers less of a "point of failure" in the party.

[Roda]

More recovery options also allow for more mechanics with teeth which I am totally down for.

[Imora]

The hell do you even get them?

[Packetdancer]

The hell do you even get them?

Phoenix downs? It feels like about 80% of the time in a deep dungeon run, opening a bronze chest (as opposed to the gold pomander ones or the silver aetherpool ones) will give you a phoenix down.

(And since you will usually already have a phoenix down, it will instead give you an error message that you already possess a phoenix down.)

[not_ya_wify]

The hell do you even get them?

They only drop from brown coffers in PotD but you can buy them also on the market board for basically nothing because they have barely any use. In other Final Fantasy games they function basically as a raise spell item for non-healer jobs. In FFXIV they are pretty much useless.

[Duskane]

I think this is a good idea
be real nice for the groups that don't have a back up raise with RDM/SMN