What dps/utility buttons old or new would you add to your healer?

[ty_taurus]

So, what did you think, btw? That's the most detail I've put yet into Healer Job reworks...

For now, I'll just go over WHM. It's getting late for me and I'll be going to bed soon.

Without digging into old wounds, what I'll say is this: WHM can still be forgiving and simple while having a little more layers to its consistent gameplay--gameplay that exists regardless of whether healing is needed or not. Offensively, what I'd like to see is:
- Giving Holy a purpose in single target environments.
- The inclusion of a legitimate Water spell at lower levels which can upgrade later.
- Some type of small "payoff" spell. If Afflatus Misery is to BLM's Foul, then something that is a modest Flare.

This would only be two additional offensive actions, and they can be executed in a way that can be simple, yet elegant. For example, what if Water and its future upgrade replace Presence of Mind? Let's say it has 2 charges with a 30 second cooldown on the GCD, but only reduces cast/recast time by 10% for 8 seconds. This gives you a very simple-to-use tool that lets you more consistently pick and choose small burst windows for attack spells, and also makes solo content a little faster.

Additionally, I don't like making all GCD healing universally DPS neutral, and I don't think it actually benefits the appeal to simplicity argument as much as it would seem to at face value. If WHM's DPS contributions are effectively at 100% uptime because everything generates Glare damage, it means that's a factor that needs to go into fight design balance, and the "least" DPS you can do is also the "most" DPS you can do, meaning there's no room for improvement there. But if you let there be room for improvement, that means a WHM who gets better at a fight and can more comfortably trim GCD heals is also able to squeeze out extra damage, and potentially help a party hit enrages, or more optimally cut out mechanics from the end of fights. If all your healing is Glaring, you can't try to squeeze out that extra damage to potentially help your team skip Snake 2/Beast 2 in P8S phase 1, for example, or skip Cochexia 2 in P6S.

If not all GCD healing is DPS neutral, that also makes you think more critically about what tools to work with during healing-heavy phases. In a dungeon, you can rely on mostly just Afflatus Solace and Rapture to handle the shallow amounts of necessary healing you'll have to put out if things run smoothly, but certain phases during EX or Savage fights that ask for back-to-back healing can force you to rely on other tools, and I think that makes the healing side of WHM more fun, no? Having to decide what the most efficient way to heal through that phase is?

As for other tools, extra mitigation is absolutely necessary if it's going to keep being as mandatory as mitigation has been this expansion. Personally, I like the flavor of extending max HP on WHM more than flat mitigation, but that's besides the point. I also think WHM deserves some kind of strong utility to help it stand out more against the other healers. I'm not sure if you've ever responded to the idea of giving WHM Float which I've brought up, as a 2 minute cooldown that lets your party ignore puddle damage and floor damage for 10 seconds, and perhaps with some additional mitigation or a regen so that it's still useful even when those mechanics don't exist.

[Renathras]

For now, I'll just go over WHM. It's getting late for me and I'll be going to bed soon.

Honestly, WHM is the one I wish you would have skipped. XD WHM I changed the least, and I know you really want all the healers to have new spells and/or interactions and/or complexities, so I already know you wouldn't like my WHM proposal. That's the one I could guess at offhand.

What I wanted to know is if you liked the SCH, SGE, or AST proposals, since those are actually more sweeping changes to the Jobs and I constructed them specifically to appeal to players like you.

Strictly speaking, I do have a solution for ONE of your concerns, though:

The inclusion of a legitimate Water spell at lower levels which can upgrade later.

Holy.

Make low level Water be an AOE centered on self that makes a water bubble float into the air and then burst.

Playing FF8 on Steam (picked it up and it's been literally 2 decades since I played it, and I don't think I ever finished it because PS2s would hardlock during the Lunatic Pandora sequence, so I'm giving it a new go!) and the Water spell there is a big water bubble that kind of forms on the enemy, floats up with them trapped inside, then pops. Water also worked this way in FF9, I believe. Water was always an uncommon spell for players in FF games, but was generally a mid-level spell. Instead of "Water 1, 2, and 3", there was just "Water" that was roughly comparable in strength to a 2.5 level Fire/Blizzard/Thunder spell (that is, somewhere between 2 and 3). Some iterations were AOE, but the animation always made it look like it should be. And given the way Holly works right now where it kind of floats up and bursts, Water doing that would make perfect sense.

Also: Did Qarn normal this afternoon in my Leveling Roulette and noticed in the very first pack "lol, forgot I don't have Holy yet... XD" when I was smacking the button and nothing was happening. (It was a fun goofy run with a DRK Tank that's normally a Healer and some chill DPS leveling folks). Getting AOEs for leveling is something that happens somewhat stupidly late for a lot of Jobs, and WHM is no exception, not getting Holy until 45. Getting an AOE Water spell at 15 when you do the Trial of Water quest. This would give you an AOE damage spell for every Dungeon in the game from Sastasha normal at 15 to level cap. The only group content you wouldn't have it for would be the first two Guildleves, the first of which enemies come in small packs and the second one is mainly a boss fight that occasionally summons 1-2 adds.

Regardless, Water upgrading to Holy would work pretty well as the Water spell's cast time and animation would be very similar to Holy's and it would be a pretty natural transition. Not to mention getting an AOE at level 15 after the Trial of Water quest just makes sense in every way possible - the quest, being the level to start running group content; the stars align themselves for it!

and the "least" DPS you can do is also the "most" DPS you can do

Not really. Letting Dia fall off would be a DPS loss, and I even explicitly said to make Glare x4 20-40 potency higher (5-10 per) vs Misery to make Glare the slightly higher damage option. Collectively, these two things already prevent your least damage being equal to your most. Though for the record, the worst player doing the same damage as the best player WOULD be a simplicity argument. You can't get more simple than that. GCD healing doesn't have to be perfectly damage neutral, but it shouldn't be a massive DPS loss. Per my way of thinking, Healers shouldn't be focusing on damage at all, and the damage should be a thing that kind of happens (basically the reverse of Eos/Kardia, which are healing that just kinda happens), but that doesn't make sense in FFXIV's combat model, so Misery/Glare/Dia works fine for that instead.

Note that the other Healer propositions are all pretty unique from that, for players that really want that high skill expression gameplay...

...which is why I'd like to hear you talk about those instead. Since I already knew you wouldn't like my WHM proposal so we didn't really need to even discuss it. I've already accepted you won't like any "leave one alone" option I present, no matter which it is, or even if I proposed adding a new Healer Job specifically to be "the simple one", so I'd rather just skip over that part and get to the good stuff of the other three since maybe we could have some agreement on those.

Other than Water -> Holy. That's a good idea I'm going to have to remember for any future proposals...

Float is an interesting idea, but I feel like the problem is it's based entirely on fight design. Either lots of fights will have to have puddles for it to matter (but if it matters too much, then WHM becomes OP), or fights won't have puddles and no one will care about WHM bringing Float. It's kind of like Expedient. Super useful when it matters (the movement speed component), but when you don't need it or when it can be detrimental (forced march mechanics), no one cares. I personally HAVE thought Float and/or jumping should mitigate some types of arena AOEs, but I'm not sure working that into a specific Healer would work, because then people would complain if they didn't have that Healer Job in their parties. In my FF8 game, just did the Brothers GF recently. Laughed at the NPCs running from the tomb shouting about using Float, and figured I could use it to avoid an Earth attack, but then in both fights when I saw Sacred and then Sacred and Minotaur both healing from Earth damage being absorbed by them (at least, I THINK that's how that works...might just be some kind of field effect, but either way...), I put two and two together and kept THEM floating for the fight, too.

It's one of the problems with situational non-damage/mitigation/healing utility - when it's useless, it's totally garbage, but when it's strong, it tends to be super strong (Expedient's speed buff was nerfed super fast); it shouldn't have to be binary, but for some reason, it often is.

.

EDIT: To be clear:

I don't mean this to be unnecessarily dismissive or anything. I just know that anything even approaching "leave as it is" you're going to dislike or propose changes to, so we're just not going to agree on that and I think it's better to simply ignore those cases because there's no way to agree on it. Even my proposed WHM changes ARE changes rather than leaving it as it is, they're just compatible with someone playing as they do today being in more or less an equal position to someone playing it the new way (rather than the new way person having an advantage), which you don't wish to allow. That is, even "change it, don't leave it alone" is unacceptable to you unless anyone playing the old way is disadvantaged/put out/unviable/etc.

So since we CAN'T agree on that, I'd rather we discuss the others where we may actually have some avenues of agreement.