The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[Renathras]

As a person who actually went through Shb and EW as an AST though, I'll respectfully disagree. Its by far the worst of the three healers considering half your cards don't benefit you and you do the lowest damage because buffing healer.

That's fair, and moving forward, I wouldn't want to just return to that format either. I've spent a lot of time trying to crack the code to the perfect card system

Not that this is a good idea (it's literally a "just popped into my head" idea), but I'm curious what you'd think about either of these:

1) Making Cards (Draw and Play) GCDs. If you have a hostile target (not friendly), Draw deals damage equal to a Malific (more or less) to the targeted enemy. (If we want to make things wild, we could make it do a Benefic's healing to a friendly if targeting a friendly, but it could also just do nothing. Play grants the card buff to the targeted ally and grants the AST "High Malific Ready" where their next Malific is upgraded to High Malific, identical to Malific in cast time and MP cost (and takes up the Malific button on your hotbar), but does 2x damage (damage neutral for Play being a GCD) and has a more explody/grand/pretty visual effect.

This would break up Malific spam with two buttons every 20 seconds, Draw and Play, with Draw dealing damage and Play boosting the effect of your following Malific as well as making it have a different VFX to change up the monotony some. I'm not sure this would break things up a ton, but it would make juggling cards in buff windows slightly less insane, and since Draw does damage and Play grants High Malific, you could take some time to consider who you want to apply them to (that is, you wouldn't need to Draw and only have 2.5 sec to think of and target the party member you want to apply to, you could put a Combust or Malific or two in between if you really felt you needed to and still be damage neutral). Would that make solo things a smidge more interesting and/or group play a little more fun and less clunky in burst?

2) Introduce the ability "Offensive Play". The AST inverts their Arcana card, playing it as a curse rather than a blessing. This outright turns cards into damage spells. Could also make it where doing so doesn't generate a seal (like old Minor Arcana use in ShB if you were fishing for your 3rd seal or were sitting on 3 and didn't want to muck that up before the burst window) if that would be nice, but could still generate a seal. Not sure which ASTs would like more. Either way, This would let the AST break up their rotation a bit with Draw and Play/Offensive Play being GCDs, and in solo play, the AST has another DPS button to press. Once you've buffed yourself, you could burn the other cards for offense instead. They could be designed to do more damage than Malific (a DPS gain) without changing group play since buffing a DPS (even with 3%) would always be worth more than, say, 2x or 3x Malifics. But in solo play, Offensive Play being 2x Malific worth of damage (or even 3x) would help speed solo encounters, where AST suffers from low DPS while also breaking up their rotation and giving the Job a niche (solo play only) optimization of using Offensive Play intelligently in buff windows.

Might something like that be useful?

Again, these were literally "just popped into my head", so I fully anticipate they could be really horrible ideas. Just curious your takes on them. If we actually had cards with different effects, Offensive Play could work differently, but even just being an attack would help AST kill things faster in solo and break up the monotony of the rotation, and Draw/Play (with or without Offensive Play) being GCD would break up the Malificspam metronome. Even if oGCD, Offensive Play would reduce the time to kill in solo encounters.

I dunno, it was just a thought...

Oh, and on Gravity - with a 5% damage reduction, how would you prevent this from just being kept up entire fights? Is there falloff/immunity on damage downs on bosses like how Stun works? I was thinking there wasn't because of the way Feint/Addle/Reprisal/Dismantle work and can be stacked/chained. Which is why they all have lengthy CDs to prevent just keeping the boss damage down-ed doing 5% less damage for entire fights. Didn't think there was an immunity to that...is there?

Not to mention the one thing I like about AST (my least favorite healer by a mile) is that it's the only one that doesn't have to stand in the center of the enemy pack in order to AOE. I like that Gravity doesn't require that. I wish SCH or SGE had a ranged option just to make them not identical with a different visual being the only distinction...

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The reason the cards were all changed to boring damage is because people only fished for Balance before ShB, with a few exceptions if Royal Road (I think the name was) was up.

One possible solution I've seen before is if all cards did the same damage buff (so no matter which is used, they all confer that "optimal" benefit), but they have some secondary effects (things like MP refresh) to make them distinct while not trading damage for those other effects. Granted, I'm not sure what the effects would be now that the 2 min window exists and so Spell Speed and Skill Speed buffs are bad, and TP no longer exists, etc.

[ty_taurus]

So to you, oGCDs...can feel interesting (and even overwhelm people) if they have short-ish CDs, variable timers (the ones that can refresh faster; MCH also does this with Hypercharge/Heated Shot), and shifting around through its oGCD kit depending on what part of the rotation it's on?

Also interesting on AST. I didn't really mess with it much until ShB other than unlocking it and leveling it a bit in HW and SB (I think I had it to level 50 or whenever you get all the cards before ShB, anyway; definitely remember the old cards and having to rebuild my hotbars after 5.0). I guess I always thought it had a second DoT. Didn't realize it was only EVER Malific/Combust. o.O

I'd say Hypercharge/Heated Shot/Ricochet is very easy to perform because it's a specific structure that works exactly one way. It's fast-paced, and latency used to create some issues, but actually performing it is easy. I would say it's satisfying though. You have a rapid GCD timer and you're alternating between two OGCDs, and it's nice that Heated Shot and Ricochet are also maintained outside of Hypercharge and are not just buttons that exist for Hypercharge.

On BRD, it's the fact that the use of the OGCDs is not structured. There are procs for several things both on and off the GCD, and the cooldowns are short. I don't think BRD is that great at the moment, like I feel like having 2 selfish buffs and 2 party buffs all with the same 2 minute cooldown just feels kind of cluttered when it could be cleaned up, and Army's Paeon is kind of a dull phase where the job slows down considerably, but I'm also not a BRD main so I wouldn't take my opinions on it too seriously.

I'm not sure if this is necessarily the angle you were going for when you initially brought up the question, but I don't really think having a healer that has a 2-3 button GCD rotation with a small handful of OGCDs would feel great to the casual healer. Being able to keep the GCD rolling while weaving OGCDs is a skill that I don't think many newer, casual, or less experienced players are all that good at performing, at least not from let's play videos I've seen of players experiencing the story for the first time. It could also be in part the focus on being entertaining and engaging with their audience at the same time, though.

This is also why when I talk about wanting depth from WHM, I mention that it should stay low APM. A job can be fun without many OGCDs and can offer room for skill development, such as BLM, and it can also be simple while allowing for more actions to work with consistently throughout an encounter. And if this were accomplished, WHM could still feel easy to approach, just with more room for development from the more experience WHM players.

1) Making Cards (Draw and Play) GCDs.

I'm all in favor of making the cards GCDs. Not everyone is on my side with that one, but besides the theorycrafting I've been posting today on here, my current iteration looks like this:
You have Solar Draw and Lunar Draw, two GCD actions with cooldowns. Solar is offensive cards, Lunar is defensive. They don't share a cooldown. Both drawing and playing cards are separate GCDs. The cards do not activate on your target immediately when you play them. Any party member can have a Solar card and a Lunar card, but not more than 1 of either. Celestial Opposition is another GCD that activates all Lunar cards on all nearby party members, activating their effects all at once, such as Bole's 10% mitigation. Celestial Fate is a GCD that activates all Solar cards. Celestial Intersection is a light GCD heal that activates both on a single target (good for tankbusters essentially). All of these GCD actions grant the AST a lodestar which orbits around them (both the drawing and playing of the cards). Stargazer is an OGCD action you weave that grants 2 stacks that allow your next spell or weapon skill to detonate one of the Lodestars, which deals malefic potency damage to the first target struck by the spell or weaponskill and 50% less for remaining enemies. Using Stargazer on another party member will cause them to detonate your stars for you, allowing you to spend considerably less time attacking enemies and having your party apply your DPS for you, though it can still be used on yourself for soloing.

There's more support for this system, such as Divination giving a solar card to the party as your buff window button, but that's the crux of the job concept. In addition, I also removed Combust in this concept for Asterism, a 2 charge GCD spell with a 30 second cooldown that generates 2 Lodestars on use. This means AST has no DoT, but has an equivalent that doesn't require a target and further supports their "attack through my allies" nature.

Oh, and on Gravity - with a 5% damage reduction, how would you prevent this from just being kept up entire fights? Is there falloff/immunity on damage downs on bosses like how Stun works? I was thinking there wasn't because of the way Feint/Addle/Reprisal/Dismantle work and can be stacked/chained. Which is why they all have lengthy CDs to prevent just keeping the boss damage down-ed doing 5% less damage for entire fights. Didn't think there was an immunity to that...is there?

Currently, the limiting factor is the higher MP cost and the short 5 second duration. You wouldn't want to keep it up indefinitely because even in savage fights, you'll still have large breaks where no damage is being dealt, and trying to would just kill your MP. That said, it's entirely possible it needs more restriction than that and more structure. Perhaps that Premonition skill I mentioned, the 2 minute AoE burst attack could also apply 3 stacks of an effect that, when casting Gravity on that target, that's what gets you the 5% mitigation and consumes the stack, so you have 3 instances of light mitigation per 2 minutes. Or something like that could work.

One possible solution I've seen before is if all cards did the same damage buff (so no matter which is used, they all confer that "optimal" benefit), but they have some secondary effects (things like MP refresh) to make them distinct while not trading damage for those other effects. Granted, I'm not sure what the effects would be now that the 2 min window exists and so Spell Speed and Skill Speed buffs are bad, and TP no longer exists, etc.

Because Damage is king in this game, utility cards wouldn't be played on Tanks or Healers, so those effects would get ignored outside of the absolute most tragic scenarios. Because sure, Bole being a 6% DPS buff with an added 10% mitigation seems equal to every other effect, but putting that on the tank (unless it's DRK during their burst window) is just not nearly as valuable as ignoring the mitigation and putting it on the DPS anyway. You'd end up in almost the same predicament that the old cards were in.