Healers, then and now:

[Renathras]

...

It's why one of my pitches is for Draw and/or Play to be GCDs that increase the damage of your next Malific (I don't know a good way to think about it, but maybe something VAGUELY like Raijin -> Forked/Fleeting Raiju on NIN where you use the one and then it unlocks the other with the second stacking to 3 charges) as kind of a way to slow down that APM a smidge to make targeting less onerous. If Draw and Play were GCDs and boosted your following Malifics, what this would allow in gameplay is for you to not have to worry about targeting a party member, Play, retargeting boss, Malific, Draw, targeting a party member, Play, retargeting boss, Malific, Draw, targeting a party member, Play, retargeting boss, Malific, Minor Arcana weave, and so on. It would break these steps up allowing you to Draw, target party member, Play, Draw, target next party member, Play, Draw, target next party member, Play, target boss, resume Malific spam, with those first 3/6 hitting harder to make it DPS neutral, and for people that really want to push the skill ceiling, they could use those to get more damage in the buff window.

It would both make AST burst a bit less murder on the fingers AND actually allow a higher skill expression with optimal play at the same time, giving it a high skill ceiling for those really wanting to push it.

Another alternative is for Draw to damage the target (if enemy) neutral with Malific, so that you could Draw, target, Play, swap back to boss, Draw; etc and only have to worry about 3 stacks and not have to do something weird to make up the damage, but I just feel SOMETHING in that general vein of thing would be helpful.

But, as I always say, AST is the Healer I play the least, so I defer to AST players for what they think a fix would be. I just feel like that would be one that could help with both the GCD Malificspam monotony AND the hyper-targeting APM in burst that drives players away from the Job.

I think AST is a lot like BLM in that people are intimidated by it PROBABLY a bit more than it deserves. I think a further thing for AST is that it's not a class fantasy that appeals to a lot of people. Some people, it absolutely is their fantasy jam, but a lot of Healers seem more into the academic Scholar, doctoral Sage, or the combination of druid, priest, and unparalleled healing/holy mage WHM (it seems to be a "project on me what you want" kind of class) than there are that are into occultic and astrology themes. There are absolutely a lot that ARE, and AST is great for them, but I feel it will always have at least some limits to its appeal - all other things being equal - just due to having what's probably the least popular class fantasy/aesthetic.

Which is another reason that I'm kind of in the "I'll defer to AST players what they want", since unless it's literally the only Healer Job still playable to me after some godsforsaken future change that I hope never happens, it would never be my main anyway.

and IIRC, AST's kit was actually the basis for the healer revamp in ShB, cause i don't think it had an AoE DoT or anything resembling one.

Agree with a lot of this post, though I'm curious about this.

Never heard this before. I always hear WHM blamed for the Healer rework in ShB, but you're saying you thin it was AST? In a way, that does make sense. WHM changed a lot into ShB (healing kit side), but AST's damage kit was the one left completely untouched (other than Gravity cast time, I guess?)

...hm. Food for thought...

[ty_taurus]

Which is another reason that I'm kind of in the "I'll defer to AST players what they want", since unless it's literally the only Healer Job still playable to me after some godsforsaken future change that I hope never happens, it would never be my main anyway.

As far as DPS vs healing vs support is concerned, AST is the healer that makes the most sense to have a playstyle that moves away from direct DPS given that it's already designed to be a buff-heavy healer and has historically had a very shallow DPS selection due to the volume of card mechanics its juggled. It's been brought up before that this doesn't resolve the issues of AST in solo content being very slow and very dull, even back during the good old days, which could be resolved with a reevaluating of how they engage with this support concept.

Personally, I'd move away from buffing Malefic through card uses specifically simply to keep pushing AST away from direct DPS as much as possible. Instead, you build stacks that you can then give to other players which detonate malefic-potency DPS as they attack. This also avoids the issue of Malefic's potency climbing to very bloated values and having a really significant crit variance issue with virtually all of AST's damage which could be a problem.

[Renathras]

...

Hm...not trying to say this the wrong way, but I think it's posts like this that make me think you don't understand the way that I think.

Speaking for myself, I like the idea of buffing people, but I don't like the idea of building exploding buffs. That just seems like "complex DPS rotation with more steps that does DPS while pretending it doesn't". The kind of buffs I like are more things like Protect or Haste or Regen (using normal FF game terminology), or...well, FFXIV doesn't have many good examples of it, honestly, since most buffs are AOE "use ever 2 min on CD". But basically, if you had a selection of buffs to choose from,t hen chose from them and cast them on people whenever, maintain buffs that can be kept up 100% of the time (like Resto Druid in WoW rolling HoTs, particularly on the Tank(s)), etc. Playing a little FFXI, I kinda love using stuff like Protect and Bar-spells, even if they're infrequent. It's also enjoyable (to my old-school MMOer mindset) of buffing random people I come across (bonus points - it levels Enhancement skill anyway)

I don't think "buff" as "stack several things on someone that then explode and do damage. To me, that's no different than Solace/Rapture -> Misery, except I like those better since they seem way more intuitive than exploding buffs and have direct and generally useful effects (filling party health bars that are lowish essentially for "free" in terms of not losing DPS or whatnot for it).

Further, I don't mind dealing damage - and do so frequently - I don't like complex or convoluted DPS rotations, preferring my mental energy be focused on heals and not damage spells. Hence what I mean about I don't think you understand the way I think.

.

Anyway, as I demonstrated on the first page of this thread, WHM essentially now plays the same as it did in SB (and HW if we ignore Cleric toggling). The main difference in a GCD sense is that we need less Cure 2/Medica casts since we get those as part of our damage rotation in Solace and Rapture, so we're doing a bit less (for players trying to be skilled, ideally zero) GCD cast healing, but if you WEREN'T having to cast Cure 2/Medica before, then the rotation would have been more or less identical, you're just using Solace/Rapture in place of 1 Aero II and 2 Aero III casts per minute (note the numbers more or less shake out the same).

So WHM as it exists right now is not only more or less what it was in SB, just less rigid (the Aeros were locked by duration, Solace/Rapture can be moved anywhere within a 60 second window), it's arguably the most complex it's been from 4.0 to present.

So all this time I've suggested "leave WHM alone" is, now that I've actually broken it down in depth, functionally equivalent to "leave WHM's damage kit like SB's" as it's more or less equivalent, people just tend not to think of Solace/Rapture as Aero 2/3 replacements, but that's what they are in the rotations and how they work in optimal gameplay.

.

Which really leaves us with the crux of it:

SCH very clearly took some major hits (GCD and oGCD), especially when Broil's cast time was reduced, and AST's underlying rotation isn't what changed, it's...basically everything ELSE in the Job, given its DPS kit is the only part that HASN'T changed.

...and then there's SGE...

Very true IMO, the removal of Miasma/Miasma II and now Ruin II being relegated to solely movement at a DPS loss is a huge problem for Scholar.
My thoughts on the weave windows every healer has are mixed, but they definitely damaged SCH's DPS "rotation" flow going into EW, since at least you'd hit Ruin II 3 times a minute or more because of the lack of weave windows. They didn't even consider something like making Energy Drain locked behind Ruin II as a combo of sorts to make Ruin II necessary to use or anything. It's strange but not unexpected.
Now, being optimal on SCH is just being a Broilbot - there's no break from hitting Broil outside of refreshing Bio; literally nothing you can do to escape it. Returning Miasma would really help SCH feel a bit better and give it something unique to do comparatively to other healers now. SCH needs its GCD damaging suite back; things like Shadow Flare (as cool as they are) can stay gone since they're functionally just boring fire and forget oGCDs (though they could make it a GCD again, I guess.)

Please return Miasma and Bane to Scholar, Yoshida. It's insane to me that the healer that starts as a DPS class and was originally "the DPS healer" now has the least amount of AoE options in the game (1 total) and optimal single target GCDs in the game (2 total).

Agreed.

Thank you for this post!

It's...so weird having all of you agree with me on things (more or less), but kinda nice.

I honestly didn't really think about HOW MUCH the Broil cast time changed SCH. I played SCH (decently enough) in ShB, and I used Ruin 2 and stuff, but I guess it just didn't occur to me how often Ruin 2 WAS used for weaves that got removed with Broil having a 1.5 sec cast. Like...you don't think about it, since I guess we all think of Ruin 2 as "movement tool", but when you think of it as "weave tool for a Job that has tons of oGCDs", suddenly relegating it to movement only exposes just HOW BIG of a change that was. And then looking at the fact WHM still has Afflatus abilities to at least mimic the lost DoT refreshes, SCH has none, and that SCH casts more Broil IV in current fights than WHM casts Glare...and it's kind of eye opening.

Somehow, I thought WHM was the worst offender here. But by the numbers and looking at actual logs...I now see it's actually SCHOLAR that has it the worst.

I'm not even sure quite what to think of that...

[Rilifane]

Why is something that doesn't automatically neatly align considered "clunk"?
My counterargument against "if it doesn't neatly align, it's clunk" is that something has a much higher risk of becoming stale the more strict, predictable and neatly aligned it is by nature. Look at how stale the 2min burst meta became: everything was stuffed into "press a few buttons every 30s, some more every 60s and ALL THE BUTTONS every 120s". And I also partly blame this obsession with making everything auto-align for the incredibly stale and boring gameplay in FFXIV.
Something isn't automatically aligned with the Dragon Sight the DRG gave me? Away with it! Someone doesn't burst during my Divination? Align it! My potion either aligns with raid buffs or my personal? Ew! My dot refresh doesn't automatically align with an oGCD I have to press on cooldown? No, can't have that.
You map out the first 2min of a fight, you loop it until the boss dies.
At this point it's not just the devs restricting the gameplay anymore, it's the players as well.

And as for tracking dots: you can split the target bar into HP bar, cast bar and debuff bar and filter the latter to only show your own debuffs, scale it to whatever size is comfortable for you and put it where you want it to be without having to pin it to a massive boss HP bar. I've put mine where my buffs are right above my hotbars so I can track my buffs, debuffs and cooldowns all at once.
Tracking dots on a single target is fairly easy in this game, multi-target is a nightmare though.

[Sebazy]

Seems a strange choice to pick SB for such an in-depth dive as this TBH? Stormblood set the tone even if they did have to walk it back a bit. ShB and EW followed the same trend.

HW seemingly ended on a very different development direction compared to how it started, I guess in reaction to how the average player took difficultly spikes seen in the likes of ThordanEX and Gordias.

As far as WHM itself goes. Yeah for sure, WHM is the best it's ever been in terms of relevance. I don't think anyone with any sense is going to deny that? I can think of 2 times in past expansions where WHM was a must pick for Savage (Gordias and Deltascape), on both occasions it wasn't because WHM was a powerhouse, but rather it was because one of the alternatives was just plain bad (AST for Gordias prog was a struggle right from A1S, SCH wasn't as bad but it still fell noticeably behind Noct AST in 4.0).

Even so, it's still not perfect. It's too mindless to play below Savage. For sure part of it is a content design problem, but job design has to take a part of the blame as well. Taking away healer utility from ARR and HW was an awful decision.

WHM, on the other hand, is oddly complete by comparison; its SB incarnation with the major issues it had at the time (MP economy, competitive damage with the other Healers, and a viable GCD healing model) all fixed.

Just a small correction, WHM absolutely did not have MP issues in SB, SCH was the one having problems there surprisingly due to crazy inflated shield MP costs if I remember right? Thin Air did absolute wonders for the job right out of the gate and was arguably the most impactful ability of the expansion (It was the reason I didn't agree with the doom and gloom the forums had for WHM leading into 4.0). Remember that WHM was competitive for Deltascape, it just fell behind once SCH was fixed for the simple reason that it's healing throughput was GCD focused with no return like we have now meaning that it's DPS contribution fell off a cliff once it had to heal. If you dropped the current EW Lily/Misery system onto SB WHM, it would have been highly competitive.

[Renathras]

Seems a strange choice to pick SB for such an in-depth dive as this TBH? Stormblood set the tone even if they did have to walk it back a bit. ShB and EW followed the same trend.

No, SB is the most logical point. I'll read through some of the rest of these later, but here's the reasoning:

1) The most available data is for SB. It's when the game started hitting it big but before the "dumbing down" of ShB.

2) SB is the cementing of the modern era of the game's design. HW had things like Cleric and encounters with things like the Gorilla to push the bombs, things that no longer exist in the modern encounter design. PARTICULARLY for Healers because it's the point where Cleric no longer existed, which ushered in the modern concept of playing a Healer in FFXIV.

3) Modern raid/encounter cadence, gearing systems, materia systems (for the most part), etc were all cemented in SB. HW still had Elemental Resist and level-up stat point allocation.

4) The modern damage profiles date to SB (HW Tanks did less damage than Healers, not more)

5) The modern Job mechanics/gauges started for most Jobs in SB.

6) Most Jobs that exist or had major additions date to SB (or later). The HW trio have all had redesigns since then, some several times, for example, while SAM/RDM and on have stayed MOSTLY the same.

7) SB was lauded (during ShB) as the height of Job and encounter design, that ShB was seen as having fallen from.

8) SB was when the game really opened up to where a majority of players were likely challenging harder content like Extremes, the 24 mans were also more challenging (launch TG Cid, anyone?), and Savage was done by at least a quarter of the playerbase, something not true by most accounts in HW.

9) Most Jobs resemble their SB forms even now, and even after reworks (excepting the most extensive like MCH and SMN); HW still had things like damage-less gap closers, bow mages, type damage buffs/debuffs (e.g. blunt damage resist down on bosses) and so on.

10) Finally, because people on this forum like to talk about how great SCH and AST were in SB (and WHM when I'm not there to remind them how much it did not), so it seemed worth it to take off the rose tinted goggles and look at that point with clear vision. On some points, they are very clearly right (SCH in particular), so it seemed the most logical point of reference for this reason as well.

.

In short, SB is the most logical place to use as the baseline. If you really go back and look through the old skills (Mr Happy's doing a series on just taht), MOST Jobs had some pretty different mechanics in ARR and HW, to the point SB+ can almost be considered "A Realm Reborn, Reborn".

[Payadopa]

Why is something that doesn't automatically neatly align considered "clunk"?
My counterargument against "if it doesn't neatly align, it's clunk" is that something has a much higher risk of becoming stale the more strict, predictable and neatly aligned it is by nature. Look at how stale the 2min burst meta became: everything was stuffed into "press a few buttons every 30s, some more every 60s and ALL THE BUTTONS every 120s". And I also partly blame this obsession with making everything auto-align for the incredibly stale and boring gameplay in FFXIV.
Something isn't automatically aligned with the Dragon Sight the DRG gave me? Away with it! Someone doesn't burst during my Divination? Align it! My potion either aligns with raid buffs or my personal? Ew! My dot refresh doesn't automatically align with an oGCD I have to press on cooldown? No, can't have that.
You map out the first 2min of a fight, you loop it until the boss dies.
At this point it's not just the devs restricting the gameplay anymore, it's the players as well.

And as for tracking dots: you can split the target bar into HP bar, cast bar and debuff bar and filter the latter to only show your own debuffs, scale it to whatever size is comfortable for you and put it where you want it to be without having to pin it to a massive boss HP bar. I've put mine where my buffs are right above my hotbars so I can track my buffs, debuffs and cooldowns all at once.
Tracking dots on a single target is fairly easy in this game, multi-target is a nightmare though.

Pretty much. But I guess we need another expansion where every job plays almost identical until people see it. lol

[ForsakenRoe]

Ren stuff

DOTs and skillcaps

Not my fault SE is allergic to fight design that extends beyond 'one boss model in a circular room'. It's hard to see how DOTs can have massive skillcap, when the fight design is more on-rails than a Thomas The Tank Engine playset and there's only ever one target to hit. Debuff tracking definitely needs work though, holy hell. Can we get an update that puts very specific debuffs on the 'emnity list' or whatever it's called, the list where you can see the blue/yellow/orange/red icons to show if you're losing aggro? So eg it'd show a WHM only Dia atm, or an AST only Combust. It wouldn't have to show, eg, a GNB Sonic Break OR Bow Shock, as they're not 'keep this up 100% of the time' type skills. You don't need to look at the lists and see 'ah this mob lost Circle of Scorn', because the timing of 'when you will use COS again' is not decided by 'it fell off', but by 'it came off CD'

Oh yeh, and RPR's stupid 10% buff, that'd be nice to have tracking for too

Are DoTs no longer snapshotted? If not, then I guess they don't, it just makes things smooth and not feel like you're fighting pointless clunk. Does Iron Jaws reapply DoTs or does it extend their duration (e.g. letting you ride a Snapshot high)?

Either way, it's nicer when things break into 15/30/60/120/180 sec divisions. 18 just "feels" too short.

The problem with it being TOO short is you have to worry about people fighting refreshing their DoT or healing a critical person, which is something the Healer rotations are designed to AVOID. The Devs really don't want a "choose to damage or heal" dynamic. They want a "you're a healer first, DPS when no healing is needed" dynamic. I know some PLAYERS don't want that, but the design goal is that.

If a healer player decides to refresh their DOT instead of healing the person who needs healing, and that leads to that person dying, then that healer player made the wrong decision. Which comes back to the same thing as whether it's 'skillcap' or not to refresh the dot when it falls off. Making the decision to delay the refresh to keep the team alive is an expression of skill. Or, making the decision to refresh the dot early, in order to keep it rolling and make time to heal the person, is also a different expression of skill. You're probably not saving anyone in that situation as WHM though, as you're probably GCD locked, unless you happen to have Tetra or Bene spare. But yeh, 'keep party alive' is priority #1. As for IJ, it essentially looks for which DOTs are up, removes them and then on the next game frame, applies a new copy of whichever were 'removed'. So if you IJ in raidbuffs, then 20s later you IJ outside of raidbuffs, you 'un-snapshot' the raidbuffs and apply a regular copy of the dots.

As for what feels 'short' or not, the issue works the opposite way too. BRD DOTs feel bloody awful to me now that they got bumped up to 45s. 30 was fine, idk why they changed it. Just to keep it aligned with song durations? So you could just turn brain off and think 'ah I refresh song, I refresh DOT'? 18s works fine on MNK, it worked fine on BRD back when Venomous Bite was 18s in HW, it's all about the context. And on WHM, I feel like the shorter the DOT duration, the more 'identity' it is. Well, to a certain limit. It still needs to have some 'over time' effect to be considered 'damage over time' right, so I would say 12 is probably ideal imo. Often enough that the damage feels 'bursty' even as an 'over time effect', but not too long that it loses that feeling and goes into the 'malingering' kind of aesthetic that fits more with SCH. And it divides into 120.

Am I getting dementia or was Venomous Bite 9s duration at one point, like at the end of ARR or something? I have vague recollections of it being super short duration but I can't remember when from...

The problem here is that PoM isn't a party buff. So this would be more like using Fight or Flight then 60 seconds later, using Fight or Flight + Requiescat. Which is just...kinda silly.

Doesn't need to be a party buff for it to be that way. GNB has a mini burst at 1min where it does it's No Mercy thing. Then at 2mins, it does all of that, but also gets to do a bit more because of Bloodfest giving 3 more cartridges. Or the previously mentioned DRK thing where it uses 'some stuff' at 1min, and then 'all the stuff' at 2min. 'The best tank design SE accidentally ever made' 4.1 WAR had Berserk at 1min, IR and Berserk at 2mins.

...'My favorite version of any tank in the game was one of the first recorded instances of 2min meta' is not the realization I was expecting to have today but here we are. Though it didn't completely match 2min meta because all the raidbuffs were staggered out, Trick at 60, Brotherhood at 90, Litany at 180, Dragonsight at 120 etc

I'm not picky about it, I just (a) want Protect back and (b) was using an "upgrade path" like what Shelltron, Raw Intuition, and Heart of Stone do.

Yeh, I'm just trying to think how to make it 'not completely dumpster AST's 60s mit' in effectiveness. Though I imagine SE don't actually think CU should have the mit (it's a holdover from Noct AST). The bubble's annoying to use anyway

Physic into Adlo is a bit weird since they're quite different in both cast time, MP cost, and more specifically, Physic is actually a stronger direct heal than Adlo. The problem is it's still mostly useless. XD Benefic 2 is already close enough of an upgrade to Benefic 1, I'm not sure why they didn't outright do it. Same cast time, 200 MP different but that's really not much (especially on AST), there's really just no reason not to.

Point is, those are different abilities with different use cases. ANY time you would cast a Benefic 1, a Benefic 2 is better. Cure isn't QUITE as interchangeable since the MP gulf is bigger, but you can still make that same relative argument. On the other hand, Medica 2 is a weaker heal that sets up a HoT to tick while having a higher MP cost vs Medica with a slightly lower MP cost and lower overall healing, but somewhat more healing "right now", and useful when the party is spread out too much that a Cure 3 couldn't cover every one.

That is, I get the thought behind it, but they actually DO have different use cases. But the Cure 1/2 and Benefic 1/2 do not.

Look again at the potencies of those skills. Medica is 400p, Medica2 is 250, plus 150p per tick. After one single tick of the regen (which can be at max 2.9s away, with a 2.5s recast time), they're equal. Helios/AspHelios are in the same boat. 400 vs 250+150. Changing them to be 300p, then upgrade to '2' and 'Aspected' versions, which just throws the regen effect on top, would work fine. Then at 84 (85? whenever the trait is), increase the base potency to be 400p on cast. You're still going to try to avoid casting them, as they cost a GCD, but at least this way you're removing a hotbar slot to make room for stuff that's more interesting. Once upon a time Medica 2's tick potency was only 50 (and it lasted 30s), can you believe that? Back then, there WAS a reason to use Med2 and then Med1 spam, but now SE's done did it and the two might as well just get merged.

Also, the thinking for Physick is simple. We currently have 450p Physick, 300p Adlo, 180% shield (so, 540p shield). Rescale it so we now have Physick (450p) upgrade into Adlo (450p), with a shield multiplier of 120%. Bam, still 540p shielding. MP cost is the least of our concerns, since it's a move that opportunity-costs damage to use.

Not opposed to this, though I think the first mission is getting Solace down to a low level. I remember posting an ability mix-up before (just reshuffling), but I put Solace down at either 30 (moving Presence of Mind) or maybe it was 18 (moving Stone 2 - I figured if Stone 2 came in the 30-40 range, it'd feel a little less boring than using it for 36 levels...). I think that Solace really needs to be way earlier to establish the "use Lilies as your first line healing". Getting it before even Cure 2 would firmly establish that and make low level healing "Solace once the Tank's around 50%, Cure 1 as backup healing if you don't have any Lilies", firmly establishing the "GCD cast heals are for backup healing" mentality and getting people used to the Lilies early on, considering how key they are to WHM's rotation later on. Getting a lower level of Misery by (at latest) level 50 would be really nice, even if Solace was the only way to generate it at that level.

Getting Lily stuff earlier would be agreeable to me as well. Even if we just have the current levels as 'this is the point where they increase by 100p, and reach their current power', or 'at this point, the speed of the lily gauge goes from 30s to 20s' traits at those points. So something like (stuff might be scuffed I'm not exactly putting thought into this):

24 - Cure 2 (class list)
30 - Solace (650p), if I got my Lily spender shields, Stoneskin would be here (300p ST)
32 - Divine Seal (class list)
35 - 'Tragedy', mini-Misery (4x Stone 2's damage), upgrades to be 4x current Stone/Glare damage at the same levels as getting new Stone/Glare
38 - Cure 3 (class list)
40 - Rapture (300p), if lily spender shields, Stoneskin II (150p AOE)
45 - Protect and Holy
52 - Lily timer improves from 30s per lily to 20s
58 - Aero 3
62 - You can now store 4 'Blood Lily Nourishments', with Tragedy/Misery costing 3, so you can actually heal without overcapping dear god why is that a thing
72 - Glare/Dia/Banish 'enlightening'
74 - Misery
76 - if my shield lily spenders were in, this would be where they get changed to Afflatus Sanctuary and Bastion, something like 450p ST and 250p AOE respectively. Without them, idk, Nourishment can stack to 5?
85 - Solace 800, Rapture 400

I still would like Lily spender that's a HoT, but maybe later.[/QUOTE]

As previous, I'd rather have one that's a shield, but that'd require SE to acknowledge how bad the pure/barrier split has turned out

When I talked about building and detonating an engine, I meant figuratively. Here's a very light overview of where I'm thinking on AST in this regard. Draw and Play are GCD actions. You can draw up to 3 cards and play them as you hold them. They apply effects like a 5% DPS buff, a 5% crit buff... all simple buffs, but you can only apply each card to one person at a time. Two people cannot have balance, and one person cannot have more than 1 card other than you (for soloing). These effects do not immediately occur once you play the card. Instead, you have another spell that causes all of your cards to activate at once, applying their effects to whom you played them on. You also have your buff window spell that can activate the card on one person and extend the effect to the whole party. Every one of these actions generates a star that will attack an enemy for malefic potency damage when you activate a specific OGCD action on yourself or an ally.

If we change Combust to 15s duration, this would be an interesting loop I think. Every 30s, it'd go Combust, Draw, Play, Play, Play, Detonator, Malefic (if needed to pad for Combust's last tick), Combust, Malefic x 6, repeat. Would be nice to do something about that Malefic x 6 but it is what it is. Though, being able to put multiple nonduplicate cards on players other than yourself could be interesting too. It'd kill the idea that 'you only want X card because it's the best' dead, because you wouldn't just want your SAM to have 'Balance cos it best', you'd want them to have Balance AND Arrow AND Spear AND another one, and you activate them all for the 2min window and all of your dps go bankai. This way you could actually have unique effects again, because 'flat damage on the SAM' isn't the only one worth having, when you could apply 'flat damage, and also crit rate, and also DHit rate, and also 'a portion of the damage dealt is compiled and dealt again at the end of the card's effect'

As for soloing, you could lean into the level 60 quest fight where the guy uses all 6 constellation thingys and stops time (???), so something like 'if you have the effect of all six arcana at once, you go super mode'. IDK what it'd do though, and it'd need to be 'not strong enough to make it better than actually putting buffs on people', which might be a challenge

Seems a strange choice to pick SB for such an in-depth dive as this TBH? Stormblood set the tone even if they did have to walk it back a bit. ShB and EW followed the same trend.

IDK Ren's reason for using SB as a basis for this thread, maybe just cos that's the one that has more readily accessible data, potencies, etc kept in available locations on the internet. As for my reasoning (and probably others), SB was the 'middle ground'. I know SE has said 'we aren't going back to 3.0 design', I accept that. There's stuff about 3.0 that was not good. Dissipation eating your fairy and not giving it back, Cleric Stance locking you out of actually being able to heal, That god awful animation lock on Bio that meant you'd Bio, Bane and spread 'sorry nothing' because the debuff hadn't applied yet, same with Deploy and Adlo, there was a lot of things about HW that were not good. Yeh some are engine stuff rather than design stuff, but there's some stuff that was just, not good design either. Cleric is the perfect example of it I think. Some players might want to go back to the days where if a newbie screwed up their Cleric Stance swap timings, it'd lock them out of healing, kill their party, and they'd never risk Cleric'ing again because of the experience. I don't. I learned how to do it, but it's too punishing and too clunky a system to learn for a new player, and is the kind of thing that would turn off newer players from the role. SB removed that clunk, but still had some stuff to keep us engaged, like SCH still had more than one DOT, AST had Royal Road, etc. The only way I'd want Cleric Stance back, as the 'stance dance' form, is as a mechanic a job is designed around. Like if SCH had 'tactics' to swap between, or if AST could swap Sects mid combat.

If we were going to get a 'compromise' with SE on what healers should look like going forward, I'd argue that Stormblood is the model for the DPS side of things to base them on, not HW. I don't know if we have room for SCH's lost SB stuff to come back, on top of the SHB and EW stuff we now have, though, it's kinda struggling on hotbar space. Unless we combine stuff, like Physick into Adlo, Lustrate into Excog (yeh Excog with a 1s CD I said it), maybe remove Emergency Tactics and just rebalance Succor to be more upfront heal, less % multiplier for the shield (so the overall shielding is still the same as now)

Well "choice" is maybe not the correct word, but having Aero 1 added dephts to the dps kit of WHM in HW.

Aero 1 was an instant-cast, unlike Aero 2 and Aero 3 which had to be hard casted. And it was a dps-loss over casting Stone 3.

So you were not refreshing Aero 1 when it was falling off, because you would lose dps. But you could use it as a movement tool, because it was instant. But you could not spam it while moving, because overwriting a DoT over and over again has no purpose. And, since the Stone casts back then were as long as the GCD, you also could use Aero 1 for weaving to avoid clipping.

AST was the same, Malefic 2 was equal potency to Aero (crossclassable, both 200p), so you could use Aero for movement, not upkeep for damage

Pretty much. But I guess we need another expansion where every job plays almost identical until people see it. lol

Issue is, there's some bad actors who will just outright refuse to see the issues for whatever reason. 'I'm having fun so whatever problem you have doesn't actually matter' kind of thing. We've had DRK/WAR 'lol same job' memes for long enough that people assumed PLD's rework was going to be WAR 3, and while it... kinda wasn't? It doesn't change the fact that DRK and WAR are alarmingly similar still.

edit:

9) Most Jobs resemble their SB forms even now, and even after reworks (excepting the most extensive like MCH and SMN); HW still had things like damage-less gap closers, bow mages, type damage buffs/debuffs (e.g. blunt damage resist down on bosses) and so on.

The other stuff, agreed, but this one stands out. All the weird stuff like Blunt Arrow (BRD silence with 50p attached, so it was never up when it was needed cos 'haha i used for damage sry'), don't miss that. But anyway, the type damage buff thing was still in SB. The 'X Down' debuffs were removed going from HW to SB, so Delerium (well, that was reworked anyway), Dragon Kick's INT down, Rage of Halone's STR down, that stuff. MNK was 'not a great choice' tier because the NIN DRG BRD MCH/SMN dream team was still in effect, due to the Piercing debuff.

You wanna know how I'd have solved the issue? MNK changed from Blunt, to Piercing. 'Your punches and kicks are fast enough to be considered as piercing a strike as a spear or arrow' is very Monk fantasy I think. How did that one escape SE's design team I'll never understand


But yeh, think about it. What pre SB job HASN'T been reworked?

PLD - 6.3
WAR - 2.1, 4.2
DRK - 5.0
MNK - started in 5.4, finished in 6.0
NIN - small rework to mudras in 5.1 to GCD them, 6.2 mug/TA changes
DRG - coming in 7.0
BRD - bowmage'd in 3.0, un-bowmage'd in 4.0
MCH - Edgar'd in 5.0
SMN - 6.0
WHM - 5.0 Lily fixes
SCH - 5.0 'remove every DOT'
AST - lmao

Looks like only BLM survived all these years. Surely a coincidence, huh

[Tint]

Looks like only BLM survived all these years. Surely a coincidence, huh

BLM got major adjustments with SB launch. Before that Enochian timer was refreshed with Blizzard 4 casts. With SB they tied Enochian to Umbral Ice / Astral Fire, added the Umbral Hearts and reduced the cooldown of Transpose so AF / UI would never fall off.

[ForsakenRoe]

Hmm, I suppose in that regard, the swap in playstyle from 'spam fire, spend firestarter procs' to 'use fire 444 1 444' cycles in 3.0 could be considered too. Idk where others would draw the line on 'what is a rework' vs 'what is an evolution of the job's kit'. Like, would the addition of Heat to MCH in 4.0 be an evolution, or close to a rework with how much an impact it had on the rotation?