Healer Area of Effect revision

[UkcsAlias]

Holy only works for about 6 seconds. After that stunning doesnt work, and any aoe of the enemies means you need to move (and potentialy cancel casting). It disrupting the ability for a tank to stun is on that a downside that doesnt matter that much (against big groups as tank you wont control them anyway).

6 seconds against tankier enemies isnt realy that much. Its mostly on outdated content that this feels massively OP. Sure, it saves you 6s from healing, but in the end, since you mostly use oGCD heals. Thats all the time you save. In 6 seconds enemies generaly dont dish out such large values that you suddenly become forced to use GCD heals.

AST: Gravity could have an added effect of Slow. Reducing the attack rate of enemies affected.

Its ranged, which i think on its own does quite a lot as it means you dont have to dodge any attacks (and that guarantees you finishing casts). And it can also be used while moving when you turn on insta casting. I think this is a decent alternative already.

And dont underestimate the value of it being ranged. If as WHM you have to interupt a single holy, the value of all the stuns barely matters since its still a lost GCD cycle at that point. Being ranged makes this interupt less likely to happen, and that is the value it gives.

For SCH and SGE, while they are instacasts, they dont realy add great benefits, since any enemy aoe already forces you out. Slow and blind wont change anything here. Giving only SGE paralyze and SCH only a blind would instantly benefit the SGE a lot more, since that can actualy interupt a lot of casts of the enemies and still allow you to stand in the danger zone. This makes them significantly weaker than holy and gravity in such effects, but their damage does allow them to be interupted every 5th cast anyway.

1 missed holy cycle takes 140 potency away. Even if gravity does less at 130. If you get interupted once every 10 casts, you are still losing out on damage value.

The problem isnt realy the effects here, its just that its a single button that you spam for all healers. And the same issue that a lot of healer abilities have.

[AmiableApkallu]

I want a conal or linear Dyskrasia. Is that so much to ask? I want to shoot lazor, not make a m3th shower.

Either shape would add a welcome bit of variety and complement Phlegma's mildly-ranged nature.

[Archwizard]

I believe that giving the healers thematically appropriate effects is a step in the right direction when homogenizing. It can give a little spice to the AoE buttons healers have. As it stands, WHM is the only one with an added effect while the other healers just have damage. What would be your idea instead?

And while I can agree about giving all healers "thematically appropriate effects", they don't all necessarily need to be hard CC.

Lemme put it to you this way: AST (as Time Mage) and WHM are two jobs I would fully expect to have some control-based effects, because of their history across the series; WHM as the early adopter of any defensive spell including damage prevention like Silence as well as being the archetype among healers, Time Mage as the eventual repository of such effects as Slow, Stop, Immobilize, Disable, etc.
SCH, put down as a hard maybe, you can justify one way or the other.

SGE however, is a job that we actually have relatively little thematic backing for. Yes, Sages exist within the series, but generally as advanced Scholar or Red Mage types, while 14's carves out a completely oblique identity that only shares the name. For instance, the most iconic character to use the Sage title within the series was Tellah, who famously was able to cast Meteor at the cost of his own life; even if Comet was in the cards for any healer, we wouldn't even consider it for 14's SGE because it exists outside the purview of SGE's abilities.
We can't really say that CC is "thematically appropriate" to the job because it's still in the early stages of what it can and cannot do -- you're assigning them Paralysis for the sake of giving each healer a CC, but not necessarily because you know it's fitting for 14's SGE specifically. This isn't to say "maybe some other CC is better for SGE, you don't know," but rather to pose the question: Is it even permitted, in your mind, for the devs to create a healer who thematically avoids CC?
Because as we can see from the existing paradigm, it's not some bare minimum requirement of the role. We see BLM as the one Caster who doesn't have rez support (or any utility outside of Role Actions) because it's designed to be selfish and falls outside of its theme since that would classically be White Magic; same principle, different role.

Even on the premise that you were shooting for some semblance of parity, the flaw in your reasoning is that no two of the CCs you mentioned were created equal. Yes, you can try to tune their durations so a 20% attack slow or 15% accuracy loss from Blind mitigates approximately equal damage to a hard Stun over the course of a trash pack, but ignoring for a moment that enemies have different resistances to different status effects (with some bosses even vulnerable to stuns that wouldn't be vulnerable to slows like Arm's Length), and ignoring that a trash pack may die well before their Slows or Blinds run out (so they didn't actually mitigate as much overall) versus a full bevvy of Stuns in the first 10 sec? Each one of these CCs is at their most powerful in different circumstances, with Stun able to act as an interrupt on powerful attacks that Slow won't. Paralysis is the next closest to this capability, but it's unreliable due to being RNG, and we still don't know the chance of its activation. Slow and Blind can't hold enemies in place when they're grouped for optimal AoE; hell, Blind is RNG just like Paralysis but without the same lockdown, so it's arguably the worst option here.
The list goes on. The only two types of CC that are truly "equal" are the ones that are just reskins of the same type of effect (like Stun vs Freeze vs Knockdown).

Like I said, there are thematically appropriate things that are untapped for each healer, like SCH throwing out a Spikes effect or SGE's "heal by attacking" theme; there isn't just one way to tune them to match up to Holy's stun window in terms of either free damage output or added defense/support.

[Sebazy]

Interestingly, SCH actually used to out perform WHM quite significantly in dungeons during HW.

1000 DPS was a realistic figure to aim for in Neverreap, the very first expert dungeon of the expansion and I distinctly remember doing more damage overall at the end of the expansion in dungeons like Baelsar's Wall.

Why? Because SCH generated most of it's AoE damage stacking dots and baneing them over the rest of the pull and dropping shadow flare ASAP. You had a GCD AoE to spam (Blizzard II) but it was a comparatively small portion of your damage vs WHM or AST which meant that when you did have to spend a GCD doing something other than nuking, you weren't penalised anything like as hard as the other healers. If you were having to heal through a rough pull with the tank not helping, most of your damage was still ticking away providing you were on the ball and getting things prepped as the pull was still in motion.

Of course SE did an SE and removed this, making SCH dependant on it's GCD nuke for aoe damage just like everyone else.

IMHO the solution is to move SCH back towards being more reliant for dot damage as it was in the past. That way it doesn't have the WHM raid contribution problem in reverse.

[AlereRaeder]

And while I can agree about giving all healers "thematically appropriate effects", they don't all necessarily need to be hard CC. [...]

Even on the premise that you were shooting for some semblance of parity, the flaw in your reasoning is that no two of the CCs you mentioned were created equal. Yes, you can try to tune their durations so a 20% attack slow or 15% accuracy loss from Blind mitigates approximately equal damage to a hard Stun [...]

I agree that I am at fault for assigning CC to the healers, I did so in a way to make my point easier to understand. SGE is the newest healer and definitely not a healer I spend a lot of time playing, so the CC i assigned the job was more loosely added. I do believe that a healer can avoid CC, and still perform in an effective way. At the end of the day, the players will chose the stronger weapon. My ideals stem from the statistics; AST and SCH are heavily underplayed in endgame dungeons, and that's my issue with it all. For every ast/sch, there are ~2 whms/sges and that's a 100% difference.

On the note of balancing; I understand that holy's hard CC is insanely strong. To balance a slow against a hard CC like stun is difficult, however we have the law of averages on our side(for the most part). As in taking the data from a holy'd trash pack and balancing a slow'd mob pack against it. Blind being similar to slow. While Paralysis may be unreliable, the effect does happen. Arm's Length's effectiveness speaks for itself.

In FF11, SCH had Accenssion and Manifestation. Accenssion works pretty much like Deployment Tactics. Manifestation makes the next spell cast over an area instead of single target. So some semblance of Bane, but different enough that its within possibility to have back on scholar. In a way that it'll work like an offensive Recitation. SGE is kind of a star child tho, we'll see what comes :P

[AlereRaeder]

I want a conal or linear Dyskrasia. Is that so much to ask? I want to shoot lazor, not make a m3th shower.

WHM already has that long cast time on Holy. If the other healers get effects on them they should be around the caster and have 2.5s cast time. But honestly, who would want them all to be the same?
What I would change is make Gravity's AoE just slightly bigger so it'll hit more than 1-2 enemies if they're not grouped up perfectly, and make Art of War and Dyskrasia different from each other. They're practically the same now.

I really liked Reiner's and Limonia's ideas. I like the vast theme in AST abilities. Also liked the conal/line AoE take on SGE. Tho, we should be aware of what happened to SAM's conal and WAR's overpower . But I will still hold fast to cool changes.

Wasn't there something like that mentioned by Yoshi in the pre-EW live letter ?
I think I remember something about adding "effects" on AoE, or was it just a translation error.

and for the homogenization argument, who remember shadowflare (sch slow/dot dome for those who don't) ? you know, when each healers had more than the same kit

If the LL stuff were true, it'd definitely increase the healer queue rate lol.

On Shadowflare, that's exactly why I thought SCH could keep the same slow effect they did back in ARR. Slow and shields are very job appropriate.

[AmiableApkallu]

At the end of the day, the players will chose the stronger weapon. My ideals stem from the statistics; AST and SCH are heavily underplayed in endgame dungeons, and that's my issue with it all. For every ast/sch, there are ~2 whms/sges and that's a 100% difference.

If we're talking about dungeons and other normal-mode content, then…

Because there is nothing in that content that requires the absolute best of the job or the player, there is no reason to assume that jobs being played at different rates is because of which jobs are stronger, and there is no reason to treat jobs being played at different rates as a problem.

For example, my problem with AST isn't Gravity. My problem is that playing cards feels unsatisfying because there is little to no feedback in-game about how effective those buffs actually are.

[AlereRaeder]

If we're talking about dungeons and other normal-mode content, then…

Because there is nothing in that content that requires the absolute best of the job or the player, there is no reason to assume that jobs being played at different rates is because of which jobs are stronger, and there is no reason to treat jobs being played at different rates as a problem.

Normal-mode AoE spell usage is the subject matter. As to avoid derailing, what I said can be observed just by anyone. You can even feel it yourself if you play SCH or AST in dungeons vs playing WHM or SGE in a dungeon. It's so much more effective, therefore stronger. When a job is disproportionately used in content, it generally means that it is the better pick. Warriors have ~120% play rate in dungeons. #Machinists

I'll acknowledge that the numbers could just be the playerbase on the healers, however that should be reflected across all content(give or take) and it does not. This leads me to believe, and even experience myself, that healer AoE scenarios vary in effectiveness.

[ty_taurus]

Normal-mode AoE spell usage is the subject matter. As to avoid derailing, what I said can be observed just by anyone. You can even feel it yourself if you play SCH or AST in dungeons vs playing WHM or SGE in a dungeon. It's so much more effective, therefore stronger. When a job is disproportionately used in content, it generally means that it is the better pick. Warriors have ~120% play rate in dungeons. #Machinists

I'll acknowledge that the numbers could just be the playerbase on the healers, however that should be reflected across all content(give or take) and it does not. This leads me to believe, and even experience myself, that healer AoE scenarios vary in effectiveness.

At the end of the day, just play the healer you want in dungeons. Never has someone gone "ew... AST in a dungeon? Gross." If other players want to swap because "WHM is the better dungeon healer," who cares? That's their choice. Play what you want to play.

I'm more concerned about healer balance in Criterion. AST might be in tatters due to losing half its buff potential. Holy's stun though might end up being a bad thing though. What happens if there's trash that needs to be stunned out of some nasty attack, but now they're stun immune due to constant Holy spam?

[ASkellington]

Normal-mode AoE spell usage is the subject matter. As to avoid derailing, what I said can be observed just by anyone. You can even feel it yourself if you play SCH or AST in dungeons vs playing WHM or SGE in a dungeon. It's so much more effective, therefore stronger. When a job is disproportionately used in content, it generally means that it is the better pick. Warriors have ~120% play rate in dungeons. #Machinists

I'll acknowledge that the numbers could just be the playerbase on the healers, however that should be reflected across all content(give or take) and it does not. This leads me to believe, and even experience myself, that healer AoE scenarios vary in effectiveness.

I'm just gonna quote myself here:

There are a lot of reasons as to why AST is less played over WHM than just that "WHM takes its spot".

• People prefer WHM's aesthetic over AST's
• Veterans of AST from HW-SB hate the card changes vs the seals system ShB-EW have insisted on and refuse to play it
• AST is a busy healer and people prefer WHM over AST's business whether its because they don't like that its busy or because they find the business to be absurd for the reward you get (me)
• AST is cumbersome for people to play be they keyboard or controller
• People have stopped playing healer altogether and some of them were ASTs mains
• People have switched to SCH or SGE because they miss Nocturnal Sect that was removed (and replaced with nothing) to make way for SGE
• AST is debatably seen as a complex/hard healer and players are turned away from that

Pretty sure AST's low play rate isn't because WHM is better in dungeons or at least just because.

As an AST player I'm pretty sure I can say that the top reasons AST isn't played is:

Astrodyne isn't worth the effort you put into it

and

let's call it "ease of access" - constantly switching targets/button bloat.