Fixing Every Healer Job

[QooEr]

Genuine curious question - why do people want the devs to make Scholar revolve around the Fae Gauge?

its kind of a waste of a UI element. and i suppose people rather make it useful than throw it away i suppose.

What could be done with "leaning into" the Fae Gauge that wouldn't be the same thing it is at the moment?

maybe if the fey gauge was an actual resource, for example if AF abilities gave different amounts of gauge and fairy abilities each cost different amounts of it. or if you could use fey gauge to increase potency of fairy actions. or if fairy actions were more powerful the more gauge you had but you could spend a lot of gauge at once for something.

then again they gutted so much of the fairy that im not sure how any of this could be interesting when we only have Whispering dawn, fey bloat and aetherpact so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Shurrikhan]

its kind of a waste of a UI element. and i suppose people rather make it useful than throw it away i suppose.

We shouldn't be doubling down on bad projects on the sole basis of their existing. Let's look at this neutrally:

Ignoring its limited spending options, since that's what we're deciding whether to change, the Fey Gauge at present...

• Is a builder-spender resource that starts from 0.
• Builds from Aetherflow spenders.
• Is decimal (stacks up to 10 contributions' worth of charge -- i.e., takes until just over 120 seconds into the fight, or about 3 minutes of sustained combat, to charge) but appears centigrade for aesthetic.

Given that, the main consequences of typing additional spenders to the Fey Gauge would be that...

• They all effectively start on cooldown.
• They all compete with each other.
• They may sometimes encourage rushed Aetherflow spending -- likely on Energy Drain.

Put more simply, to tie Fey skills to the Fey Gauge would be to greatly diminish one's use of Fey skills unless met with a plethora of accordant changes.

[QooEr]

Put more simply, to tie Fey skills to the Fey Gauge would be to greatly diminish one's use of Fey skills unless met with a plethora of accordant changes.

i agree. if they wanted to make fey gauge interesting theyd have to make either it or the entire healing kit something wholly different since as it is its pretty much just taped with duct tape onto scholar.
i honestly think its "fine" because it gives some marginal nuance to aetherpact... (eg if aetherpact is simply a regen on a cd you cant micromanage fey union ticks. which you usually never need to anyways but at least the option is there).
i dont think it merits changing everything just to make this shoehorned gauge feel less out of place.

[Silver-Strider]

We shouldn't be doubling down on bad projects on the sole basis of their existing. Let's look at this neutrally:

Ignoring its limited spending options, since that's what we're deciding whether to change, the Fey Gauge at present...

• Is a builder-spender resource that starts from 0.
• Builds from Aetherflow spenders.
• Is decimal (stacks up to 10 contributions' worth of charge -- i.e., takes until just over 120 seconds into the fight, or about 3 minutes of sustained combat, to charge) but appears centigrade for aesthetic.

Given that, the main consequences of typing additional spenders to the Fey Gauge would be that...

• They all effectively start on cooldown.
• They all compete with each other.
• They may sometimes encourage rushed Aetherflow spending -- likely on Energy Drain.

Put more simply, to tie Fey skills to the Fey Gauge would be to greatly diminish one's use of Fey skills unless met with a plethora of accordant changes.

So make the Accordant changes that would allow the system to function. If they can change how the Lily System used to function from SB to ShB, there isn't really a reason they can't do similar to the Fairy Gauge.

Have it start at 100 Gauge.
Whispering Dawn, Fey Blessing and Fey Covenant cost 25 gauge, while Seraph and Aetherpact cost 50
Have your DoTs build up the gauge in a similar fashion to BRD's Soul Gauge but to help mitigate bad RNG, continue to allow Aetherflow abilities to build up gauge. Throw Broil in for good measure.
Make Dissipation grant the use of 1 Fairy Ability at no cost on a 90s CD.

Theoretically, that would work but SE would never allow it because they can't be bothered to put more than 2 brain cells towards healer design.

[Shurrikhan]

So make the Accordant changes that would allow the system to function. If they can change how the Lily System used to function from SB to ShB, there isn't really a reason they can't do similar to the Fairy Gauge.

Lily didn't merely make "accordant changes" to the system's context and spenders, though. In fact, both were untouched. It outright changed the Lily System itself to something that had only the name in common.

Have it start at 100 Gauge.
Whispering Dawn, Fey Blessing and Fey Covenant cost 25 gauge, while Seraph and Aetherpact cost 50
Have your DoTs build up the gauge in a similar fashion to BRD's Soul Gauge but to help mitigate bad RNG, continue to allow Aetherflow abilities to build up gauge. Throw Broil in for good measure.

Okay, so now your 320 AoE heal shares resource costs, at equal expense, with your 480 AoE heal (over 21s) and your +10% healing for 20 seconds. Given that you and your cohealer would need to then do 3200-4800 AoE healing over that time to make up for the lost Blessing or Dawn... are you then ever going to use Covenant?

And, is it worth buffing Covenant to the point of being competitive with those other options? Is a heal being instant worth losing a third of its potency? Will there actually remain use cases for the alternate spenders, or have you turned them into non-options?

These aren't rhetorical questions, but they would need to be answered before just making 4 abilities newly fight each other for usage would at all likely be a good idea.

Theoretically, that would work but SE would never allow it because they can't be bothered to put more than 2 brain cells towards healer design.

Well, that's what we have people who actually play the game for -- the 0.1% chance that if they hand a completed enough vision to the devs on a silver platter, the works of more than just 2 brain cells might nonetheless slip through into the game.

[Silver-Strider]

Okay, so now your 320 AoE heal shares resource costs, at equal expense, with your 480 AoE heal (over 21s) and your +10% healing for 20 seconds. Given that you and your cohealer would need to then do 3200-4800 AoE healing over that time to make up for the lost Blessing or Dawn... are you then ever going to use Covenant?

And, is it worth buffing Covenant to the point of being competitive with those other options? Is a heal being instant worth losing a third of its potency? Will there actually remain use cases for the alternate spenders, or have you turned them into non-options?

These aren't rhetorical questions, but they would need to be answered before just making 4 abilities newly fight each other for usage would at all likely be a good idea.

That depends on what else is adjusted really.
What if SCH's shields were adjusted to make them advantageous enough to warrant using Covenant over Dawn or Blessing? Say that Addlo now reflects back 140 potency worth of damage on hit, as an example. Most shields would be gone on 1-2 hits from a boss. Between the mitigation and buff to the shield granted by Covenant, if that was able to make it 2-3 hits instead, would that not be worth it? You get a small damage increase over Broil and both Covenant and Addlo becomes actually something to consider using, even more so if it crits. Obviously, you can't Addlo spam everyone in AoE situations so Blessing and Dawn still have their purpose, with Covenant being more as a way to mitigation and potentially gain DPS thru Addlo. Then, I already provided Dissipation to help negate the cost of a Fairy Ability so that there would be less conflict of usage as well. Finally, the abilities still have CDs so isn't not as though the abilities will even conflict with each other any more than they currently do, especially if we add DoTs and Broil as means of accumulating Fairy Gauge that resource management would be almost a non-issue.

It's a bit rough around the edges but still possible.

[Shurrikhan]

That depends on what else is adjusted really.
What if SCH's shields were adjusted to make them advantageous enough to warrant using Covenant over Dawn or Blessing? Say that Addlo now reflects back 140 potency worth of damage on hit, as an example. Most shields would be gone on 1-2 hits from a boss. Between the mitigation and buff to the shield granted by Covenant, if that was able to make it 2-3 hits instead, would that not be worth it?

I like your thinking there, but unless an affected shield would otherwise have just barely broken on the second hit, nothing in the order of 10% bonus healing raidwide (Covenant), or even a Divine Seal (+30% Spell healing) for oneself is going to make a 50-200% increase in hits taken before said shield breaks.

More simply, though, I think you'd simply have to rework Covenant. As you'd likely want to do with Aetherpact anyways (e.g., to cost 10 gauge per 3s tick of healing thus provided). I'm also unsure if I like Seraph being on there at all, considering it grants more than 75 gauge worth of resource (the benefits, essentially, of all the other spender options) and thus becomes a non-option, a mere CD that at best has some (arguably wonky) margin play by which one can't use other spenders when coming up on Seraph's CD because the latter so outweighs the others' efficiency.

Finally, the abilities still have CDs so isn't not as though the abilities will even conflict with each other any more than they currently do.

That seems a cop-out, unless said CDs are at least less than they are now.

Imagine, for instance, if Lustrate, Sacred Soil, Indom, Excog, and Energy Drain all had CDs of a minute or more. Due to attaching Broil to its generators (I'd have to hope at a mere 5 per, at least, if you don't want it capping in under 20 seconds), your earlier spitball generation would cap the Faerie gauge roughly per 30 seconds, while likewise offering 3 actions worth (25, 25, and either 50) of spenders from cap. You'd be unable to spend the resource as quickly as you build it if you left no (nearly) CD-less options.

Or, more generally put... If the SCH can't leverage the situational advantages of one ability over its alternatives (or avoid being budgeted less advantageous abilities) beyond what it could before then why have the shared resource at all? If the system doesn't cause new considerations (i.e., conflicts and affordances), leaving us just doing as we did before, then it will be mere bloat.

[Silver-Strider]

Snip

Well, with Dissipation no longer granting a 20% heal boost, we could probably give that to Covenant to compensate and maybe increase the mitigation from 5% to 10%. I feel that lowering the CD of Covenant 60s would also be beneficial. Still might not be enough but since most "Heal" checks in the game nowadays are mitigation checks, it would still be a buff in that department to consider.

For Seraph to work on the Gauge, her abilities would probably need to be free to cast to justify it being on the gauge at all. Having her off the gauge, depending on if Consolation cost gauge or not, would still result in a 50 gauge cost for using Angel Whisper and Seraph Illumination so I don't really seem much of a difference whether she's on or off the gauge. Personally, I think Blessing should have turned to Consolation while Seraph is out but that would mean they'd cost gauge as well so I figured having her on the Gauge and just making her skills free to cast would be a good compromise but that's just me.

I imagine Fey Blessing is weak enough to where it could be lowered to a 30s CD without much issue; It's just a weaker Indom so I don't really understand why SE put it on a 60s CD to begin with, which is even more perplexing considering it started off costing gauge as well. Being on a 30s CD would allow it to be used more than Dawn or Covenant at least so you could somewhat stem the tide of overflow but Gauge generation was something that I was unsure of on the direction of which to go with. Originally, I was more for just having Aetherflow abilities no longer build up Gauge and just having DoTs and Broil build it up since that would generate quickly enough on its own that you'd always have enough gauge to continue using your fairy abilities without much issue. However, since I knew that newer players would be somewhat apprehensive to do much DPS when starting off, it would be harder for them to heal with SCH that I sort of haphazardly kept the Aetherflow aspect of it to at least help them out a bit, despite knowing it might be a bit more than could realistically be spent in that case. It was just a matter of, do I want to give an olive branch to new players, even if it came at some level of detriment to the design. Ultimately, I chose the olive branch.