Delete rescue from the game.

[ForsakenRoe]

People have suggested ways to change things, they just get ignored by SE so people stop posting in the thread and it falls off of the front page. Just off the top of my head I know me and Ty have both posted reworks for things (iirc Ty did all 4, I focused more on WHM and SGE), but the interest died down and so those threads are now on page 4 or something where nobody will ever find them again.

There's literally zero excuse at this point to not have a melee healer though, as the hitboxes on bosses are so large you have 100% melee uptime in every fight anyway. If a Holy Paladin can work in WOW, where Kurog's hitbox is 'pretty small actually', it would work completely fine in this game where you can reach the P7S boss from 90% of the arena.

AOE Rescue will not 'rescue' the healer role. It'd be potentially interesting as a tool to have 'just in case' but it's too likely to just get everyone killed too. Imagine P5S double stacks, AOE Rescue and oops everyone's doublestacked and you're dead

[Renathras]

...

Oh, brainstorming is fine. I'm just saying that's something SCH has that a lot of people don't like, so spreading it to others who are actively choosing not to play SCH because they don't like it seems ill advised. Moreover, one of the complaints about Healers right now is that they feel too much alike. So "solutions" that make them feel even more alike also seem ill advised. That said, there's plenty of feedback to the Devs on what they do and don't want changed. I suspect one of the reasons the Devs are "resisting" changing Healers is because the people that don't frequent forums are telling them in various ways they like them. Apparently AST is the Healer where this is resoundingly not true, given they planned a rework already but have pushed it off to 7.0. I could be wrong, but I bet the Devs have a better handle on what the majority want than these forums do.

Indeed, the survey results on Reddit already indicate these forums have a significantly more negative view towards Healers than the overall playerbase does.

The problem with a melee Healer is it would necessitate a 2 Caster 8 man comp. So even if 2 Caster was considered viable or equal with 2 Melee (the former is debateable but the latter is not), the melee Healer Job would ONLY be viable in that specific comp, or would be doing the equivalent to chain casting Tomahawk during various mechanics, relying on a higher DPS output from their team to make up for them. This is even worse if it was like a WoW Holy Paladin where some of its healing kit REQUIRES it to be in melee, making it lose access to some of its healing if forced to disengage.

I think the key there is that the combat system/encounter design has to be made less rigid before that can be an option.

I think part of the trick is seeing that Healer Jobs should be different. Having a Job like WHM isn't a problem. Having all Healer Jobs in the game be like WHM is a problem. Likewise, having a Healer Job like SB SCH isn't a problem. Making all Healer Jobs into SB SCH is a problem. Substituting one "they're all the same" for another "they're all the same" won't make things better, it will just shift around who is pissed off and who is happy. It's why I've long advocated for changing up some of the Healers but not all of them.

There's literally zero excuse at this point to not have a melee healer though, as the hitboxes on bosses are so large you have 100% melee uptime in every fight anyway.

Lol, fair point, but only for EW bosses. And still ignoring that there are forced disengage or "4 ranged spots" mechanics during which you'd be doing the equivalent of spamming Tomahawk for a big DPS loss. I guess it'd be more like spamming Scathe?

[Sebazy]

Lol, fair point, but only for EW bosses. And still ignoring that there are forced disengage or "4 ranged spots" mechanics during which you'd be doing the equivalent of spamming Tomahawk for a big DPS loss. I guess it'd be more like spamming Scathe?

I'd see the meleeing aspect of a healer akin to WHM's Lilies, you're DPSing whilst also healing and pocketing further resources for down the line. As long as it's melee focus was a means to generate resources whilst functioning optimally I think it'd be fine. Times where it was forced out of range could be taken as moments to spend said resources in optimised play, not to mention that boss hitboxes are so huge these days that you can smack them from deepest Narnia anyway. I don't think it would be a problem now in the same way it would have been back in 2.x-4.x.

Watch some world prog team Savage PoVs on YouTube. It's kind of surprising how little time you need to spend out of cane slap range.

[ForsakenRoe]

I'd see the meleeing aspect of a healer akin to WHM's Lilies, you're DPSing whilst also healing and pocketing further resources for down the line. As long as it's melee focus was a means to generate resources whilst functioning optimally I think it'd be fine. Times where it was forced out of range could be taken as moments to spend said resources in optimised play, not to mention that boss hitboxes are so huge these days that you can smack them from deepest Narnia anyway. I don't think it would be a problem now in the same way it would have been back in 2.x-4.x.

Watch some world prog team Savage PoVs on YouTube. It's kind of surprising how little time you need to spend out of cane slap range.

It can have downtime tools like how RPR has HarvestMoon, or something to bank while doing their normal rotation to use at range like a Toxicon of sorts

[Tigore]

Alright. We may have to back off from spell suggestions first to make the rotations different. Waxsw does seem to agree on differentiating the DPS logs. Since even with the differences in WHM, Dosis is still spammed the same as Glare in the end for... 80% - ish of the GCDs according to those graphs? We may need a draft of what type of DPS system each one should have.

According to Waxsw, we may be trying for a semi cooldown combo system for Sage.

Astrologian would be the simplest one by default due to the card system. Probably just needs an AoE DoT with Royal Road. Still need to decide which card buffs to use.

I know you said you would hate it Renathras, but a DoT mage sounds like a potential Scholar fate. The decision between manually Dotting all targets, or using Bane spreading with half pot DoTs. I imagine 4 targets will probably be the Bane point.

This leaves the White Mage. Currently, it is being compared to others for differentiation, but it will still have comparable buttons to what Astrologian has if we keep it the same. Pretty much just Afflatus Misery and Assize may feel different in that comparison.

[Renathras]

...

My personal position would probably be to give one of them a 1-2-3 (and possibly -4) combo system. "But they're casters, not melee"; MCH is close enough (and once was) a caster and has a 1-2-3. SGE having a 1-2-3 of lasers would work fine. Though I have a different Job in mind for the 1-2-3. For SGE, we can go two ways with it. One way is to make it like RDM or BLM where it has kind of a balance/back and forth rotation (simplified, of course; no melee phase of RDM/no extra stuff of BLM, just the core rotation). So if you think of BLM with just Fire 1, Fire 3, Blizzard 3, Fire 2, Freeze, maybe, or if you think of RDM having only Jolt/Stone/Fire/Aero/Thunder and their AOE Impact/Aero2/Thunder2. Either one of those might work for a A-B-C-D-A-B-C-D kind of a thing. The nice thing about SGE is its healing with Kardia. In my mind, its healing kit should be focused around that. Kardia, a second Kardia with a short duration (think AST's Synastry just for Kardia heals), an AOE Kardia with a short duration (for party healing), and a Soteria (for bigger Kardia healing). This gives you your base Kardia but also 3 offshoots for second target (off-tank), AOE (party), and boosted (Soteria) healing. I feel like those should be up frequently (short CD) and SGE's oGCD kit should probably overall be balanced to be a bit weaker so it's AUGMENTING Kardia, not REPLACING Kardia. Once that's done, the DPS rotation here is what's generating the lion's share of your healing, ideally, using those Kardia modifiers intelligently with some mitigation to smooth damage.

Alternatively, we could do a complex CD dance, but in practice, I'm not sure which would be better/worse...

SCH as a DoT mage seems to be what everyone wants. I'd just quit playing it, but as I've said before, I'm fine with the Healer Jobs all being different so that everyone can have one they enjoy; a corollary to that is that some of them would be such that some players wouldn't enjoy them. But that's true now - I don't enjoy AST now, I just also wouldn't enjoy SCH. That just means I'd stop playing them, but other people would be (presumably) playing them, so everyone wins. Yeah, I'd hate it, but I'm fine with that as long as there is at least one Healer that I don't hate.

I feel like this may be a case of you being relatively new here (not a dig, just an observation), but we've actually had a lot of these conversations here. My position has consistently been to change some of the Healers and make all four differentiated so that individual players can gravitate to the ones they like. If there's only one that I like, that's fine with me, as long as there's at least one that I like. I figure we need to leave one Healer alone (either SGE or WHM seem the best candidates) with their current DPS kits for the players that enjoy the way Healers are played now. People that like current healing would shift to those Jobs, and people that don't would have three other options to use instead.

I call this the "Four Healers"/"4 Healers" model, in contrast to many here who kind of want to make all the Healers more complex, but then we have the problem that they're mostly the same again, just more complex, which, as I say, just makes a different set of people mad.

I feel like AST needs more GCD damage buttons. People play AST because they like complexity, they play WHM because they don't. So giving WHM the more complex rotation and AST the less makes little sense to me. "But it has tons of button bloat", yeah, but it's a WHM clone, not the other way around. In a case of "We're both wearing the same outfit, ONE of us has to change", the clone/one that came after should be the one to change, imo. Not to mention it makes no sense for AST to be "the simple healer" since that would require gutting and simplifying its oGCD tools to be like WHM already is, at which point why do it instead of WHM? I've thought before AST would be a good candidate to remove the DoT and make it a 1-2-3 rotation Job. This way, it is just doing a 1-2-3 while weaving its various oGCDs between them. Since the 1-2-3 is a steady cadence that can be muscle-memoried, this should take little brainpower away from the oGCD game that AST plays.

WHM is the leading candidate for the Job I wouldn't touch. IF FOR SOME REASON we leave SGE alone instead and decide to change WHM (a bad idea since WHM is the introductory Healer, the baseline, and has long appealed to people that want a simple and straightforward kit), I'd probably make the changes minor. Aero 3 for AOE DoT which upgrades to Banish, Water at level 15 for an AOE Holy (that upgrades to Holy at 45). Some big ability they build up to where they case Flood, Quake, and Tornado (maybe something akin to PLD's Requiescat, perhaps retooling Presence of Mind into this, and that would be your "Swords Combo"), and make the Water/Holy have a use in single target. Maybe something like every Glare gives you a stacking buff "Increases the damage of the next Holy by 25%, stacks to 4", so every 4th Glare you'd want to weave in a Holy. Granted, for this we'd want to do the thing I said in another thread - make Holy work like Cure 3 where you can cast it on a target OR, if you're not targeting an enemy, it will use it on your location - but if we did that, it would make Water/Holy have a single target use, and give us the three CNJ core elements at all levels of gameplay; Stone, Aero, Water at low levels, Glare, Dia, Holy at higher levels, and adding Quake, Tornado, and Flood for the big hit burst combo at high levels. Also make Assize a GCD like Plegma that stacks to 2. Because...I dunno, why not?

.

Despite people insisting otherwise, I DO have a mind for adding damage abilities, I just don't like my Healers so heavily inclined to DPS rotations and want one of them - WHM, SGE, or SCH; I hate AST now and if it's the only one untouched, I'd just quit healing at that point and be pissed - left as it is now. If that's WHM or SGE, I don't mind either way.

[IDontPetLalas]

Alright. We may have to back off from spell suggestions first to make the rotations different. Waxsw does seem to agree on differentiating the DPS logs. Since even with the differences in WHM, Dosis is still spammed the same as Glare in the end for... 80% - ish of the GCDs according to those graphs? We may need a draft of what type of DPS system each one should have.

According to Waxsw, we may be trying for a semi cooldown combo system for Sage.

Astrologian would be the simplest one by default due to the card system. Probably just needs an AoE DoT with Royal Road. Still need to decide which card buffs to use.

I know you said you would hate it Renathras, but a DoT mage sounds like a potential Scholar fate. The decision between manually Dotting all targets, or using Bane spreading with half pot DoTs. I imagine 4 targets will probably be the Bane point.

This leaves the White Mage. Currently, it is being compared to others for differentiation, but it will still have comparable buttons to what Astrologian has if we keep it the same. Pretty much just Afflatus Misery and Assize may feel different in that comparison.

Sorry, but this disagree with you there. Why, and how would that enhance solo play - if you believe that AST should see improvement in that area - which I do.

Not to mention, while you mention button count- why I can understand that there could be limitations in order to accommodate controller players- I could see "comparable" to WHM, however if AST has more that WHM, it would bother me at all. Not to mention I would still see it spamming its single DPS skill for much of the time in group content.

However if the devs started to improve the skill design, as a number of people have suggested, then probably some skills wouldn't even have separate buttons- with AST having a rework it would likely be the first to see this. I would expect the other healers to lag behind

edit - I posted this just before I saw your post regarding PLD, that's somewhat in the lines of what I'm referring to.