Should GCD Healing also trigger Sage's Kardion effect?

[Eorzean_username]

To be clear, this topic is in reference to situations where a Sage (and possibly cohealer) have already exhausted every possible OGCD healing tool, and still need more healing output to prevent KOs (and/or cannot use any more OGCD heals in the moment due to budgeting them for another section of the encounter already, etc).

Specifically, I was looking through a discussion about early-weeks healing in Pandaemonium floor 8S 1 and 2, and saw someone mention that Sage is objectively-disadvantaged in situations where Healers are actually forced into GCD healing.

The reasoning was that Kardion triggers are basically Sage's balanced-in equivalent of the Scholar Fairy. However, the Fairy keeps healing regardless of what kind of GCD the Scholar is using. Therefore, Sage feels disproportionately more pressured in GCD-forced healing situations, because in those cases, Sage suddenly loses the flow of Kardion-triggered heals.

Should Diagnosis and Prognosis (and the Eukrasian versions) also trigger Kardion? Would that be more or less balanced?

I have no specific opinion myself, just curious what dedicated healers think.

[AnotherPerson]

I think Sage should get more GCD damage skills that can trigger Kardion in different ways instead.

The problem with this hypothetical scenario is not that the Sage's Kardion has a worse output than a SCH's embrace when both healers are required to GCD heal extensively, but it's because SCH's Fairy embrace is much more flexible than Sage's Kardion when you look at the Scholar's toolkit as a whole. You cannot compare Kardion to Embrace in a 1-to-1 scenario because of all the skills that affect the real throughput of Fairy's embrace make Embrace work differently than Kardion.

Scholar's toolkit has skills that are meant to take advantage of their varying power of their embrace output to their GCD to oGCD healing output. This can be seen in: Dissipation, Aetherpact, and Summon Seraph. Dissipation removes Embrace for 30 seconds, but they get bigger GCD shields (bigger burst heals but bad MP economy). Aetherpact makes their embrace stronger. Seraph makes their embraces also apply a shield. Although you can't use all these skills at the same time, they give a lot of flexibility to SCH when they need more healing or more shielding. In actuality, Scholar's 3 skills give more nuance to simply "more healing or more shielding", it's more control over sustained healing and burst healing as well.

SCH can:
1. Choose to use Seraph when they plan on needing more burst oGCD healing + shielding for one or more targets (Consolation unlocked, Effective single target potency increased due to shield effect of Seraphic Veil).
2. Choose to use Aetherpact when they plan on needing more sustained oGCD healing for one target for a specific period of time - and can be toggled on/off.
3. Choose to use Dissipation when they plan on needing more burst GCD healing + shielding for one or more targets (Succor boosted, Adloquium boosted). Alternatively, they can activate it when they don't need single target Embrace healing and want more damage.

Now you add Recitation + Deployment Tactics + Emergency Tactics + Fey Illumination + Protraction, and it makes sense that SCH has a GCD-healing mode when the healer needs it for recovery. If anything, SCH's Fairy "Embrace" actually heals less than Sage's Kardion on its own, but it's more optimized for efficiency for when you need to rely on that mechanic -- and this scenario highlights the fundamental difference between the two healer toolkits. The Sage's Kardion is not designed to be played like a Scholar's Embrace simply because Embrace works differently compared to Kardion's current iteration.

Kardion is just a consistent effect when you have to attack. Consistent healing and unchanging. The healing is wasted when you don't need it and you can't really control or store the healing when you don't need it. The only changes to Kardion is that it can scale with Physis II + Soteria + Krasis. However, only one of those skills directly affect Kardion alone -- Soteria, but it's only for one party member. While the increase in potency is a good starting skill, it's not very flexible on its own. There is no indepth system built around it. This is the main issue with Kardion. Kardion doesn't need to work with Eukrasian Prognosis or Eukrasian Diagnosis by simply activating Kardion. Putting a Kardion effect on Eukrasian shields is akin to putting a small band-aid to a large wound. The underlying issue of Kardion being very inflexible in contrast to Embrace will not solve itself. Instead, there needs to be more compatible GCD skills that make it worthwhile to activate Kardion to make Sage stand apart from Scholar (such as activating an attack that gives Kardion to multiple party members for the next couple of spells + attacks that changes Kardion's healing to give a shield instead + attack mechanics that temporarily store your Kardion healing away to charge your Eukrasian shields by a base potency). Otherwise, Sage just tries to become Scholar 2.0 but worse.

This is part of the reason why SCH can feel absolutely clunky when you can't use Aetherpact + Dissipation + Seraph together, but it is still considered the best healer around. It simply has a lot more control that Sage cannot offer because the Scholar toolkit works well as a whole in terms of both relying on its GCD to oGCD healing management. The current iteration of Kardion does not have this effect to its GCD healing because Sage can only rely on oGCD healing to continuously activate Kardion. While the Holos change helps to make a purely-oGCD centric gameplay for Sage, in the end, the lack of variety on Kardion effectively makes it impossible to have the same level of recovery as a Scholar does when it needs to GCD heal.

[ty_taurus]

As it stands, I think having Diagnosis and Prognosis, as well as their Eukrasian counterparts, works well as a passable source of healing when there's no enemy to target, such as during a phase change, and they shouldn't also trigger Kardia because the whole point of SGE is to avoid GCD heals like the plague more than any other healer. You're not supposed to want to even think of using those tools when an enemy is present. However, the potential of Kardia is really lacking. Like with what AnotherPerson said at the beginning, SGE should've had a wider selection of offensive spells that apply different effects to your Kardia target.

[AmiableApkallu]

SGE should've had a wider selection of offensive spells that apply different effects to your Kardia target.

How is this supposed to work? How is this interesting? That's something I've never understood.

If we ignore latency and FFXIV's netcode, Kardia/Kardion could be a GNB Continuation-style button that procs after Dosis and company. The mechanic is essentially GCD damage + oGCD heal, which is not a new play style. What makes it mildly interesting, I suppose, is that the actual implementation lets you weave in a second oGCD heal of your choosing, despite the 1.5sec cast time on the original GCD.

[ty_taurus]

How is this supposed to work? How is this interesting? That's something I've never understood.

If we ignore latency and FFXIV's netcode, Kardia/Kardion could be a GNB Continuation-style button that procs after Dosis and company. The mechanic is essentially GCD damage + oGCD heal, which is not a new play style. What makes it mildly interesting, I suppose, is that the actual implementation lets you weave in a second oGCD heal of your choosing, despite the 1.5sec cast time on the original GCD.

Imagine if you had different spells that had other effects on your Kardia target, such as:
- Applies a barrier instead of a heal
- Heals in an AoE
- Heals a larger amount
- Provides mitigation
- Provides an offensive buff
- Provides a healing action potency increase

We have tools that are just OGCD buffs, but SGE could both diversify its GCD gameplay as well as condense its total buttons by replacing tools with offensive spells that provide the original tools' effects. Zoe could've been a DPS action with the same potency as Dosis that provides the same effect and would create a pseudo combo with Pneuma. Krasis could've been a DPS spell that provided its current buff to your Kardia target. I really wish instead of automatically generating over time, Addersgall was generated by a GCD spell on a 20 second cooldown with charges. PVP Pneuma shows how Panhaima could've been an offensive spell, and I kinda prefer that to our current Pneuma, though as it stands, Pneuma's burst healing is really important to have in harder content so it couldn't exactly be replaced, but what if Ekurasian Pneuma offered the effects of Panhaima?

Eurkasia has a lot of potential to make a growing library of offensive spells create choice between what Kardia effects you want on a target, as many other tools would likely need to be limited behind cooldowns or MP costs.

This direction would both play into the tools SGE already has as well as the fantasy that SGE is trying to fulfill. It would give people who want that green DPS fantasy to have a job suited to them, and those that don't want that... Well WHM, AST, and SCH still exist.

[Renathras]

In a word: Yes.

This has bugged me about SGE from the start of it, for the reasons you outline. Eos heals even if SCH's are casting Adlo (or not casting at all, including if they're frozen/petrified/etc), and SGE GCD healing kind of isn't the best as is, so it also cutting off a part of their semi-passive healing is weird. It also would somewhat rectify GCD healing as being a DPS loss - it'd still be a loss, but that little additional healing might allow for additional GCD damage in the future, making it a slight return.

At the very least, I can't think of any way that this HURTS gameplay or balance in any way. At worst, it's a very weak Synastry, and that's hardly game breaking (to this day I have no idea why Synastry's CD is so freakin' long...)

[Seraphor]

Imagine if you had different spells that had other effects on your Kardia target, such as:
- Applies a barrier instead of a heal
- Heals in an AoE
- Heals a larger amount
- Provides mitigation
- Provides an offensive buff
- Provides a healing action potency increase

We have tools that are just OGCD buffs, but SGE could both diversify its GCD gameplay as well as condense its total buttons by replacing tools with offensive spells that provide the original tools' effects. Zoe could've been a DPS action with the same potency as Dosis that provides the same effect and would create a pseudo combo with Pneuma. Krasis could've been a DPS spell that provided its current buff to your Kardia target. I really wish instead of automatically generating over time, Addersgall was generated by a GCD spell on a 20 second cooldown with charges. PVP Pneuma shows how Panhaima could've been an offensive spell, and I kinda prefer that to our current Pneuma, though as it stands, Pneuma's burst healing is really important to have in harder content so it couldn't exactly be replaced, but what if Ekurasian Pneuma offered the effects of Panhaima?

Eurkasia has a lot of potential to make a growing library of offensive spells create choice between what Kardia effects you want on a target, as many other tools would likely need to be limited behind cooldowns or MP costs.

This direction would both play into the tools SGE already has as well as the fantasy that SGE is trying to fulfill. It would give people who want that green DPS fantasy to have a job suited to them, and those that don't want that... Well WHM, AST, and SCH still exist.

The problem with this is that you would need to select your dps spell based on the healing/mitigation effect you need.
This would mean all of those dps spells would need to be identical single target potency attacks.

I agree with expanding Eukrasia though.
I've considered before a Eukrasian Toxikon, in which ot boosts the potency at the expense of losing that weaving window; essentially doing what Energy Drain does for SCH in a dps sense.

[Supersnow845]

Kardia is a refund for DPS’ing why should it proc off GCD heals, eos is irrelevant here because just as you lose a kardia tick to using e prognosis you also lose embrace ticks to casting fairy spells or moving eos because of her GCD

It completely messes with SGE’s lore and really only provides benefit if you are e diagnosing a paper tank, at that point you should be wiping and explaining what went wrong.

[ty_taurus]

The problem with this is that you would need to select your dps spell based on the healing/mitigation effect you need.
This would mean all of those dps spells would need to be identical single target potency attacks.

I agree with expanding Eukrasia though.
I've considered before a Eukrasian Toxikon, in which ot boosts the potency at the expense of losing that weaving window; essentially doing what Energy Drain does for SCH in a dps sense.

This is true that they'd all need to be the same potency, but that's not inherently a bad thing. Which actions you choose aren't exclusively about the raw potency they provide, and if you did have tools that offered different types of support, you'd still be alternating your offensive choices, it just wouldn't be a "rotation" in the traditional sense. But not everything would have to be lower potency. Depending on what types of restrictions you create, you could have certain tools able to be stronger if given charges and cooldowns. The biggest issue getting around that though is the burst meta.

For example, you could also create a tool that deals higher damage, but enables a support tool rather than immediately applies it. So you're using the DPS spell on cooldown, or with charges when you can/during burst windows, but then the added utility behind it is available until you're ready to use that action again. I don't really think it's a true issue, and you can create a bit of variance to it, it's just tricky and requires a bit of thinking.

[Liam_Harper]

Definitely not. Not only does it reinforce bad habits like spamming GCD heals, it also just deletes the entire point of Kardia even further and makes it purely a click and forget passive regen on one target.

The heal component of E-Prog could probably do with a buff though. Using it on the move is a neat QoL, but 420 is just a wet noodle of a raid heal and it should at least be on par with Succor. Then plain Prog could be buffed to 400.