The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[glamazon]

Oops sorry I quoted the wrong post :-(

[ty_taurus]

One thing I've wondered is if giving Assize a 2 charge system would help.

I think a better solution for Assize is removing the heal from the initial use. Assize is just damage at first, but they while it's on cooldown, you can reactivate it to perform the heal. This acknowledges how players use it on cooldown while the heal now has more room to be used as needed if needed without creating friction between the heal and the DPS.

A quick rule of thumb, to me, is that charges only at best free up whatever number of casts per cycle necessarily cannot be buffed by the raid cycle anyways, because, as you said, "people would... put it into buff windows." For a 40s CD like Assize, a second charge offers 40s of freedom.

However, that freedom will also detract from rewards for skillful variance (e.g., for specifically wasting uptime on Assize in order to, to greater net effect, avoid GCD healing), so there's a balance even there. Because this isn't the only way to fill a function (healing), compared to a second charge on a sole gap-closer, a second charge here grants far less to accessibility compared to what it takes from skill ceiling.

As such, I'd really, really like to see oGCD healing tuned down first (which doesn't even necessarily make healing any harder so much as just reduce Glare casts over time --which can be compensated for anyways with bonus potency on offensive casts-- and make MP a little bit less of just a rez meter) such that holding Assize would be rewarded, more so than to simply embrace that "there's no point in holding CDs anyways" failing of context by jumping straight to a second charge and 1 in 3 Assize casts being freely timeable.

If there's something that fails just because of context and a fix for that context would help other areas too and isn't that far a reach, I feel like we should deal with the failing in context first and then see what feels best for each individual skill.

I also agree. I think the relationship healers have between healing and damage is not a bad one, but just having a wealth of OGCD heals has not boded well for the experience of healing. While I do want wider DPS libraries, I like feeling like there's a decision I must make between my attacks and my heals. I liked playing as a SCH in ARR, HW, and SB, and feeling like Adlo and Succor were a regular part of my gameplay, not just a last ditch effort for survival. It's true, though, that there could've been a lot more interactivity between my actions that SCH could've received as time went on.

This is why I think making healer optimization about managing resources that allow your GCD heals to refund lost damage can be a part of the logic that goes into healer gameplay loops that can feel more rewarding. Your attacks aren't just about attacking--they're also about supplying yourself with the tools you need to keep your teammates alive without losing momentum.

[Shurrikhan]

I think the relationship healers have between healing and damage is not a bad one, but just having a wealth of OGCD heals has not boded well for the experience of healing. While I do want wider DPS libraries, I like feeling like there's a decision I must make between my attacks and my heals. I liked playing as a SCH in ARR, HW, and SB, and feeling like Adlo and Succor were a regular part of my gameplay, not just a last ditch effort for survival. It's true, though, that there could've been a lot more interactivity between my actions that SCH could've received as time went on.

It's hard for me to say exactly where that relationship goes from merely watered down (or, suffering from an excess of bird droppings, etc.) to outright 'bad', but I agree that the excess of oGCD healing (not necessarily even the button count, but just their power relative to healing requirements) seems like the biggest thing disrupting the balance between attacks and heals necessary to make it feel like there's decisions to be made between the two.

Some people like the business of AST weaving, some people think it's gone too far. I don't know if GCD cards is the solution, but maybe half-GCD like DNC steps or NIN mudras would retain some of the business, while still being a bit more lenient (you don't have to doubleweave like a madman, and can just go like, card, malefic, card, malefic, card, to give breathing room to see who to throw the card on)

A NIN GCD would actually be just as busy as (and likely feel busier than) an oGCD in most situations.

You presently have only a 1.5s cast time on Malefic, which leaves 1s in which to weave the card and your next cast. If you replace the Card oGCD with a Card-ra, you have the 1.5s cast time, but then a .5s period where you can't usefully hit anything, and only then the .5s queuing period for the Card-ra GCD, which in turn gives only .5s to set your target again for Malefic.

So instead of just going smoothly from one action into the two at any time over the following second, you go... then stop, action A only, and then action B only at 0.5s each.

Gonna relink a potential more... 'universal design' solution concerning managing single-target healer buffs despite/around optimizing (especially, offensive) uptime.

<Ideas on improving the control scheme such that oGCD single-target buffing would be a non-issue anyways, even for controller players, while making the game smoother as a whole>

[Jybril]

Still looks like healers are boring as hell and now with my friend is a Paladin main, he's already opting to now play less as his job got killed.
Just going to wonder how many more jobs are gonna be turned into water before SE realizes these aren't fun and people will just quit.

Still very frustrated after all these years that AST is complete boring garbage. I didn't fish for Balance, I used every card and made due with what I had.
HW AST was hard, but it was the best iteration imho. I thought I read AST was getting a rework but I don't see anything new. The only thing I can
take with solace now is that AST feels closer to what I miss in PvP more than anything else and I can only enjoy it in just really CC where I can
prove my skill in AST again like I did in 3.0. Just so damn tired of SE making baby mode jobs.
Stop insulting your playerbase's intelligence please with making jobs so easy that you legit can play while in veg mode lmfao.

Also, LOL the WAR heal buff is hilarious. The same very job that tell me to "not heal just dps"
Just make us DPS supports if you don't want us to heal anymore my guys.
Not gonna be pressing 111111111111111-2-111111111111 though so figure that out.

[Renathras]

I didn't fish for Balance, I used every card and made due with what I had.

A lot of people didn't (fish, just made due). The issue was that the "serious" people did, and made a big deal about it. I've heard it said that all the homoogenization and all the simplification in FFXIV (or almost all of it) is because the playerbase asks for it. Not the whole or a majority, but some very vocal people. In the case of AST, I think the argument was that cards other than Balance sucked (I think there were two that were useful if you could do the AOE or whatever of them, but the standard version people also avoided) and "Devs, make these other cards more useful!" type stuff was said. So the Devs went path of least resistance and just made all cards Balance.

I thought I read AST was getting a rework but I don't see anything new.

I think this is slated for 7.0/the next expansion. They consider it an expansion-level rework. Which could be good or terrifying, we'll have to see in a year or so when they preview stuff in the media tour which...I guess happens with the Japan Fanfest or round-abouts?

I think a better solution for Assize is removing the heal from the initial use. Assize is just damage at first, but they while it's on cooldown, you can reactivate it to perform the heal. This acknowledges how players use it on cooldown while the heal now has more room to be used as needed if needed without creating friction between the heal and the DPS.

So sorta like Lilybells/Star having a release button for the heal but the GCD starts ticking on initial use? I kind of like this idea.

I think the relationship healers have between healing and damage is not a bad one, but just having a wealth of OGCD heals has not boded well for the experience of healing. While I do want wider DPS libraries, I like feeling like there's a decision I must make between my attacks and my heals. I liked playing as a SCH in ARR, HW, and SB, and feeling like Adlo and Succor were a regular part of my gameplay, not just a last ditch effort for survival.

Didn't they remove Energy Drain in ShB initially because they thought having heals and damage fight over the same resource was bad because (in optimization) damage always wins?

The odd thing to me about that, though, is I feel if they were really worried about that, they'd make all GCD heals generate a damage neutral resource. GCDs are effectively a "resource" that we trade between healing and damage, too, but I guess the Devs don't see it that way. One could argue it's to make a higher skill ceiling, but the Devs have thus far shown they want the skill ceiling on healers to be lower, so it just seems odd they are unwilling or unable to grasp that GCDs and damage are part of that calculation with at least a good chunk of the most vocal components of the playerbase, and it's one change that wouldn't hurt the 70+% or so that are casual and never run high end content. If Jonny Casual generated more Misery stacks by casting Cure 1, it's not like that would hurt the game or his play experience.

I don't think "dealing damage" should be tied to healing generated (except maybe on SGE, though this would also require a more extensive rework of the Job). I hate that in PvP. It's okay as a playstyle for a healer, but I don't think it would work well with the general community. But having standard healing tools generate resources to normalize damage shouldn't honestly be a problem other than it would lower the skill ceiling, I suppose. But that's technically the Dev's intention anyway. And the thing is, at least two (WHM and SGE) healers already have the basis for such a mechanic. Having any non-damage GCD generate a Blood Lily 1/3rd or making SGE GCD heals generate an Addersting when cast (not when the shield is consumed) and making Toxicon damage neutral (2x a Dosis cast) would outright solve that for both of those healers. Granted, there's be some weird optimization in burst windows, but that shouldn't substantially change the skill ceiling, I wouldn't think. And the rotations wouldn't really increase in complexity or number of abilities, either.

Honestly, Kardia is a good system imo, they just need to flex it more.

[ty_taurus]

The odd thing to me about that, though, is I feel if they were really worried about that, they'd make all GCD heals generate a damage neutral resource. GCDs are effectively a "resource" that we trade between healing and damage, too, but I guess the Devs don't see it that way. One could argue it's to make a higher skill ceiling, but the Devs have thus far shown they want the skill ceiling on healers to be lower, so it just seems odd they are unwilling or unable to grasp that GCDs and damage are part of that calculation with at least a good chunk of the most vocal components of the playerbase, and it's one change that wouldn't hurt the 70+% or so that are casual and never run high end content. If Jonny Casual generated more Misery stacks by casting Cure 1, it's not like that would hurt the game or his play experience.

It's true. There seems to be a resistance, an ignorance, and/or an outright rejection of how the healer role is played by the community. The way we view DPS as a resource and the GCD as a resource is something that has come up in discussion in live letters, and the response is always very lukewarm, but there's this sense of total disconnection in those responses. I really can't say how Yoshida actually feels about the topic as he obviously as to respond in a very PR friendly way, but I can't help but feel like he really wants to say something like "will you just stop worrying about that?" And I say that because there's always this really heavy dejected sigh whenever questions about healers come up.

The odd thing to me about that, though, is I feel if they were really worried about that, they'd make all GCD heals generate a damage neutral resource. GCDs are effectively a "resource" that we trade between healing and damage, too, but I guess the Devs don't see it that way. One could argue it's to make a higher skill ceiling, but the Devs have thus far shown they want the skill ceiling on healers to be lower, so it just seems odd they are unwilling or unable to grasp that GCDs and damage are part of that calculation with at least a good chunk of the most vocal components of the playerbase, and it's one change that wouldn't hurt the 70+% or so that are casual and never run high end content. If Jonny Casual generated more Misery stacks by casting Cure 1, it's not like that would hurt the game or his play experience.

When I mention the idea that healer optimization should become about generating DPS neutral healing, I don't necessarily mean locking the player out of healing, but rather, that the resources you gain allow your healing actions to refund lost DPS under specific conditions. Your healing is still available, but what Jonny Casual would lose by poor optimization is just uptime. Your ability to heal stays the same. And it also doesn't necessarily need to stem from specifically offensive tools either.
EDIT: Quick note, I read one of the above statements wrong so forgive me for thinking you took my statement as locking players out of healing. It's my early morning brain.

Here's an example of a lily system adjustment that's been floating around in my head lately. It's not something I'm entirely sold on quite yet, but it exemplifies what I'm talking about quite well. With this concept...

I'd propose changing the way the lilies work slightly. We do not have Afflatus Solace and Afflatus Rapture as we have them currently, and lilies are not generated passively over time. Instead, you have, let's call it that Budding Afflatus name I game in that same track WHM 90-100 skill example I posted earlier. This would have a cooldown of let's say 30 seconds with 2 charges on the GCD. When used, it generates 1 lily and nourishes the blood lily. While you have lilies, Cure II changes to Solace and Medica changes to Rapture, which makes them instant cast, but, while you have any amount of lilies, ALL GCD heals consume 1 lily and nourish the blood lily. If you have no lilies, they are used as normal.

Additionally, I've mentioned additional DPS actions I'd like to see on WHM, but let's actually keep it really simple and in line with current WHM for the sake of consistency. All we add is the Water spell, which later upgrades into Banish or something. Water/Banish is a GCD attack spell that's a little stronger than Stone/Glare and has a 30 second cooldown as well, but no charges. When used, it reduces the cooldown of Budding Afflatus by 10 seconds. Playing WHM optimally now means you want to make sure you're using Water/Banish on cooldown every 30 seconds, and probably trying to reserve an OGCD heal to weave after Water/Banish in case you do need healing at that 30 second window, and doing so gives you an inch more damage while also giving you more lilies throughout the fight to access DPS neutral healing more frequently. Jonny Casual can still access all of his healing actions, but if he learns to optimize his use of Water/Banish, he'll perhaps lose a little less DPS uptime throughout the fight.

Perhaps it doesn't function exactly as the way I put it, but if it were something in that train of thought, how would you feel about something like that?

As for SGE talk...

The issue with making Toxikon a flat DPS neutral on use of E. Diagnosis/E. Prognosis is it makes SGE absolutely broken. For 100 more MP, which is negligible, SGE essentially has access to a 1-2 combo that is not only as effective as 2 Glares/Broils/Malefics from the other healers, but also offers HP recovery and prominent barriers every other GCD. Even if we retain the barrier breaking mentality, in Savage, that barrier will absolutely break within a couple GCDs anytime the boss is using a tankbuster, auto attacks, or raidwides. SGE would destroy the other healers. I 150% want Toxikon to be changed into something that isn't just a glorified Ruin II, but we really need to rethink Addersting generation to make that happen. I definitely want SGE to feel like the GNB of healers--the healer that plays like a DPS, because that's clearly something at least a fair chunk of the healer community wants. I want more GCD DPS spells and some DPS weaving for good measure. And I agree that the Kardia system is a good concept, it's just not utilized at all when we could have different offensive spells offer different effects to your Kardia target. There are countless ways this could go, and I really hope we see that shift as we move into 7.0.

But that actually leads me to a question that I would like to ask specifically you...

I have a couple references videos that I'd like to bring up for this question: Alphinaud's Reveal in the Endwalker Trailer and the Red Mage Job Actions Trailer. (Any non-healer from the job actions trailer works really, but I just think RDM's is very smooth).

First of all, I'll let it be known that I am an aesthetics snob. I desire games that look stylish. I want to look stylish in game and have stylish gameplay, and I am obsessed with SGE's design. Alphinaud's appearance in the trailer had me so excited to try out the job even knowing how unlikely it was that healer gameplay was going to improve. Even now, I keep trying to play it because I want that fantasy in as many environments as I can, but what frustrates me the most is that I do not feel like Alphinaud in that trailer. The job action trailer videos are not an accurate depiction of gameplay, but I like how stylish RDM looks in that trailer, and their gameplay does resemble that in the trailer. RDM isn't just standing their spamming Jolt, they're cycling through a variety of different, epic looking spell effects. But when I play SGE, almost all of my gameplay looks the same--me firing a bug zapper at the enemy over and over. That doesn't look stylish to me. I don't feel like I'm this amazing master of magic capable of multitasking 4 independent aether-controlled weapons firing off a rainbow laser light show while keeping my teammates healthy.

So my question is, do you feel this way about playing WHM and just seeing WHM casting the same exact spell over and over for major chunks of the gameplay? Even if that's not the part of healing that gives you dopamine, does it bore you at all that you'll spend large swaths of time in the same casting animation casting the same shiny light? Would you prefer if at the very least, your 1 filler DPS button cycled through Glare, Quake, Tornado, and Flood, or something just to give you something different to look at? Because even if SGE simply had like a 1-2 button combo that cycled through 4 or 6 animations like GNB's continuation, but was really just a glorified Cascade > Fountain without the Reverse Cascade or Fountainfall... I wouldn't be happy per say, and I would still want change, but I think I could at least tolerate playing as SGE long term and not feeling burnt out from the bug zapper after 1-2 dungeons and need to go back to DNC.

And that actually leads me into an idea of a compromise on WHM that may actually work for a change, assuming the idea I proposed before with Water/Banish was one you were okay with...

This is a slightly different rotation than the example above, but earlier in this thread I shared where my headspace is at on a WHM rotation that's similar but a little different. Basically, you have Glare as your filler, Dia becomes AoE with falloff damage (as the other healers would have more complex ways of applying AoE DoTs, like restoring SCH's Bane, WHM just innately has their DoT be AoE), Water is just a precursor to Assize, and Assize in animation is moved up to level 72. It starts off as damage only, but would gain that recast for the heal effect at level 56 and would just be in line with how it functions now. Soul Drain is a new, Aerith inspired DPS button that is half Glare's potency but restores MP and makes your next spell instant cast, and every 5 spell casts grant you Aerith's Tempest, which is a little stronger than Glare and both Soul Drain and Holy combo out of Tempest, where Soul Drain's potency is raised to be neutral, and Holy generates 1 lily when used as a combo (also DPS neutral). Also there was Aerith's Fleeting Familiar on a cooldown, which you press and will attack enemies for you over your next 5 casts of any spell dealing very small damage but nourishing the blood lily after all 5 stacks are consumed; this being a spell effect and not a pet.

But lets simplify just a little and hybridize these two suggestions for a moment and then I'll discuss the compromise solution. Let's go with Water being a precursor to Assize, WHM gains this take on Soul Drain and Tempest, with you getting 1 use of Tempest every 4 casts of any spell instead of 5, and rather than Tempest's combo into Holy being a free lily, it reduces the cooldown on Budding Afflatus by 5 seconds. And the concept of the Budding Afflatus and how lilies function is from the above suggestion. This would give you a DPS library of: Glare, Dia, Assize (OGCD), Tempest, Soul Drain, and Holy as your "rotation" as well as Fleeting Familiar potentially if we like that concept.

Now as for the compromise, how would you feel if you had the option to instead of setting Tempest and Soul Drain to your hotbar, you have the option to have a PVP style auto combo, which is to say, your filler button of Glare will automatically switch to Tempest whenever Tempest is available, and after Tempest will switch to Soul Drain. So pressing that 1 button will automatically send you through your basic "combo" of sorts leading you into the MP restoration and instant cast utility. You'd still need to maintain Dia on your own, and if you want to combo into Holy you need to get closer to the enemy and manually trigger that to get more lilies across the course of the fight, but the bulk of your damage contribution can optionally be on 1 button for you. Players who want to set Tempest and Soul Drain separately can still do so and have regular Glare that will not auto combo, and the auto combo only looses a small amount of optimization if you never combo into Holy.

Do you think something like that would feel like a healthier compromise? I can't speak for everyone else on if they feel that would be enough for WHM, but I'd certainly be a lot more content with something like that at least.

[Shurrikhan]

The odd thing to me about that, though, is I feel if they were really worried about that, they'd make all GCD heals generate a damage neutral resource. GCDs are effectively a "resource" that we trade between healing and damage, too, but I guess the Devs don't see it that way. One could argue it's to make a higher skill ceiling, but the Devs have thus far shown they want the skill ceiling on healers to be lower, so it just seems odd they are unwilling or unable to grasp that GCDs and damage are part of that calculation with at least a good chunk of the most vocal components of the playerbase, and it's one change that wouldn't hurt the 70+% or so that are casual and never run high end content. If Jonny Casual generated more Misery stacks by casting Cure 1, it's not like that would hurt the game or his play experience.

I don't think "dealing damage" should be tied to healing generated (except maybe on SGE, though this would also require a more extensive rework of the Job).

I think that'd actually be all the more harmful to, especially, the 70+%, as it'd be taking something at least somewhat intuitive (don't GCD heal if you don't need to) and replacing it with optimally wasting heals in cycles to be readied for Cards and, to their caps in preparation for sync with 2-minute damage buffs.

For that reason, though, I 100% agree with that second part. Or at least, I think healing shouldn't prep damage, even though --as a job-unique tool (e.g., Sage, as you said)-- I'd be okay with damage conveying healing so long as it's sufficiently leveragable™.


Going to make the obvious comparison real quick, between a theoretically more damage-based and WoW's damage-based-healer, the Discipline Priest. I cannot stand Disc, mostly because it just doesn't have enough control over its rate of damage for its healing not to feel like a predominantly passive trickle. Imo, if Sage were to go that route, it'd need to be hugely bankable / have really strong control over its rates of damage (and thereby healing).

Ideally, though, I'd also like it to have control over that rate of conversion, too, preferably such that there may --if, say, there were ever content that could offer very threatening but lowish HP mobs to burn down-- a damage-to-healing Sage might have to decide between reducing damage intake by helping to kill the threat that much faster vs. chugging out counter-healing.

(In a lot of ways, if ignoring the constraints of animation for a pipedream-y moment, those 4 nouliths feel like they should be perfect for finding ways to create gradations of healing (many) vs. focusing on damage / resource generation / etc., especially for something like, say, challenging 4-man content.)

The issue with making Toxikon a flat DPS neutral on use of E. Diagnosis/E. Prognosis is it makes SGE absolutely broken. For 100 more MP, which is negligible, SGE essentially has access to a 1-2 combo that is not only as effective as 2 Glares/Broils/Malefics from the other healers, but also offers HP recovery and prominent barriers every other GCD. Even if we retain the barrier breaking mentality, in Savage, that barrier will absolutely break within a couple GCDs anytime the boss is using a tankbuster, auto attacks, or raidwides. SGE would destroy the other healers.

This.

Or, to put it another way, the only reason Lillies are flat DPS neutral is because Solace/Rapture takes the place of otherwise oGCD free sources of healing (such as Durochole and Ixochole) on similarly 20s CDs. That's it. To be an otherwise perfect 20s GCD CD mirror of others' 20s oGCD CDs, it needs to refund the lost potency.

Eukrasia-Diagnosis, on the other hand, has no CD. Toxicon is just a copy-pasta EuD-equivalent to Adloquiem's crit bonus additional effect, but through situational AoE potency gains instead of further value awarding more offensive uptime (more generally useful, as long as there's sufficient damage intake to not leave other healing tools on the backburner). It's not meant to be a zero-cost... because it's not a CD.

[RinaShinomiya]

*wakes up from the 10 months of slumber*
Lurking around this thread has been interesting to say the least. Went to work at 5AM local time and came back at 1PM to 3 new pages of "essays on who is actually the poopy one".

To give my 2 cents to the whole conversation the idea to improve all the healer DPS kits while leaving WHM unchanged sounds like absolute lunacy to me.
What makes WHM simple is it doesn't need to pay attention to what the enemy is doing as much as the other healers. It can almost completely heal off of the party list alone because it has the least amounts of barriers or spells you need to prep in advance out of most of the healers. Giving it more DPS buttons or DPS buttons interacting with each other (if we added some diet-BLM traits for example) would do absolutely nothing to make it as complex of a healer as AST, SCH or SGE (and even calling these 3 complex is an overstatement in my humble opinion).

First of all, I'll let it be known that I am an aesthetics snob. I desire games that look stylish. I want to look stylish in game and have stylish gameplay, and I am obsessed with SGE's design. Alphinaud's appearance in the trailer had me so excited to try out the job even knowing how unlikely it was that healer gameplay was going to improve. Even now, I keep trying to play it because I want that fantasy in as many environments as I can, but what frustrates me the most is that I do not feel like Alphinaud in that trailer. The job action trailer videos are not an accurate depiction of gameplay, but I like how stylish RDM looks in that trailer, and their gameplay does resemble that in the trailer. RDM isn't just standing their spamming Jolt, they're cycling through a variety of different, epic looking spell effects. But when I play SGE, almost all of my gameplay looks the same--me firing a bug zapper at the enemy over and over. That doesn't look stylish to me. I don't feel like I'm this amazing master of magic capable of multitasking 4 independent aether-controlled weapons firing off a rainbow laser light show while keeping my teammates healthy.

To be fair, that's just Toxicon I having a better animation than Toxicon II. Because Alphinaud really doesn't do much in the trailer other than cast Toxicon I with a dramatic camera angle. Hitting level 82 has never been so disappointing, Hope level 92's Toxicon III is better.

---

A more jokey comment:
I dunno what this healer negativity is all about! It took Square 3 major patches to make E.Prog provide Toxicons. We're eating GOOD! *faint screams of pepsis in the distance*

[ForsakenRoe]

First of all, I'll let it be known that I am an aesthetics snob. I desire games that look stylish. I want to look stylish in game and have stylish gameplay, and I am obsessed with SGE's design. Alphinaud's appearance in the trailer had me so excited to try out the job even knowing how unlikely it was that healer gameplay was going to improve. Even now, I keep trying to play it because I want that fantasy in as many environments as I can, but what frustrates me the most is that I do not feel like Alphinaud in that trailer. The job action trailer videos are not an accurate depiction of gameplay, but I like how stylish RDM looks in that trailer, and their gameplay does resemble that in the trailer. RDM isn't just standing their spamming Jolt, they're cycling through a variety of different, epic looking spell effects. But when I play SGE, almost all of my gameplay looks the same--me firing a bug zapper at the enemy over and over. That doesn't look stylish to me. I don't feel like I'm this amazing master of magic capable of multitasking 4 independent aether-controlled weapons firing off a rainbow laser light show while keeping my teammates healthy.

I had an idea of a trailer shot where someone (WOL or Alphinaud) is walking through a warzone type area. People are dropping, people are getting shot at, etc. And this hero figure is walking, unflinching and undaunted, because his nouliths are semi-autonomously healing those who need healing, shielding those who need shields, and when a massive projectile is about to hit them, it hits, you see the smoke clear, and they're still walking without even reacting to the projectile, because the nouliths got it covered. I think it's cos of this particular heroic figure

To be fair, that's just Toxicon I having a better animation than Toxicon II. Because Alphinaud really doesn't do much in the trailer other than cast Toxicon I with a dramatic camera angle. Hitting level 82 has never been so disappointing, Hope level 92's Toxicon III is better.

True and real, which is why, in this idea I had to make SGE an actual 'do damage to cause healing' kind of healer, I put Tox 1's animation onto Phlegma, Phlegma's current animation onto Eukrasian Phlegma (applies DOT in AOE, gain in 2 targets or more), and Tox 2's animation, uhh, looks like I didn't specify. Maybe we could throw it on 'Dosis when it's empowered by Toxicon', call it Toxicosis or something.

Or, to put it another way, the only reason Lillies are flat DPS neutral is because Solace/Rapture takes the place of otherwise oGCD free sources of healing (such as Durochole and Ixochole) on similarly 20s CDs. That's it. To be an otherwise perfect 20s GCD CD mirror of others' 20s oGCD CDs, it needs to refund the lost potency.

's why I suggest 'free use of Phlegma' as the payout instead of Toxicon (that gets reworked), optimizers can bank it like Dark Arts for raidbuffs, casuals can just blow it whenever, it's a 60p loss compared to Toxicon's current 330. If someone were to spam E-Diag > PhlegmaProc over and over, they'd be losing 30p on average per GCD (60 per 2), and it'd be draining them of their MP kinda bad, because Phlegma costs 400 too. It'd be good-ish for keeping DPS up during, say, Terminal Relativity though, which would be cool.

[ty_taurus]

To be fair, that's just Toxicon I having a better animation than Toxicon II. Because Alphinaud really doesn't do much in the trailer other than cast Toxicon I with a dramatic camera angle. Hitting level 82 has never been so disappointing, Hope level 92's Toxicon III is better.

With the Alphinaud reference, I wasn’t really trying to say that what I want is that particular animation, which we technically have a very sped up version of prior to level 82. Rather, I want my gameplay and rotation to create an experience that feels like how that very cinematic Toxikon I looks.

Like I said, I don’t want to just zap my enemy with a bug zapper over and over, I want a combination of actions that look like I’m bombarding enemies with a laser light show.