Just one additional Damage Spell could do a lot - Mushrooms and WHMs

[Eisi]

Nah, no reason for that. “Attack” becomes meaningless after constant uses. It’s just feeling at some point. I understood the idea, it’s just not going to happen. All I can see them doing for 7.0 is another mitigation or big healing tool for SCH since their path for the game is the decline to abolishment of DoTs.

I don't care!

I care about whether the idea has any merit or not and what could be improved! It's just for fun, not a 'Square Enix has to do this' type of deal. And I meant the idea in the OP btw, I have no real clue what to do with Scholar yet.

[Semirhage]

It'd be an improvement on Glarespamming for sure. I'd want more eventually, since this boils down to a trio of 1-2-3 combos, which...I guess the melee DPS enjoy them, but I don't consider them ultimately engaging gameplay. The debuff that makes heals not cost damage is cool though.

[Osmond]

I don't care!

I care about whether the idea has any merit or not and what could be improved! It's just for fun, not a 'Square Enix has to do this' type of deal. And I meant the idea in the OP btw, I have no real clue what to do with Scholar yet.

Well, since it’s WHM……I don’t see them adding another dmg spell. I do agree with the other user in the OP is the consolation of cure 1 into 2 make sense. I do see them adding a new ability that gives WHM free 3 lillies for a misery so no waiting to proc 3 Aff. for it. ……………….,……….I take that back, they may add another dmg spell at max lvl for 7.0. A Xenoglosy-like version for WHM for single target, oGCD perhaps.

[Eisi]

It'd be an improvement on Glarespamming for sure. I'd want more eventually, since this boils down to a trio of 1-2-3 combos, which...I guess the melee DPS enjoy them, but I don't consider them ultimately engaging gameplay. The debuff that makes heals not cost damage is cool though.

I wanted them to not be 1-2-3 combos. You can either 1-2-3 or 2-1-3 and then 1-4-3 or 4-1-3 and every 1 can also be replaced by a healing GCD. For multitarget it would be 2-4-3 or 4-2-3. The variety in cast times - instant for maximum movement, 1.5 seconds for possible weaving and 2.5 seconds as full-commitment casts - are to spice things up and let you have fun with it. Melees don't have cast times!

You can also blend in lily heals and there is no combo interruptions or anything. I wanted it to be something for healers, not melee enjoyers, meaning there's enough room for you to keep track of incoming damage and health status of your party. Which I guess the mushroom system can be read as an extremely simplified ranged and cast masterful blitz, but not really, there's no perfect balance ogcd required, it's only two shrooms, the skills are all equal in damage for single target fights so there is no priority and even if you got the wrong mushroom, you can immediately correct that.

I'm glad you like it, I wanna GCD heal not as a sort of last resort, but just like that, I think it's weird how the game disincentivizes GCD healing. The heals themselves I would also have a look at though, to make them more interesting. I think there is some design space left with gcds that isn't annoying but actually cool like for example I would have Cure III be a placed GCD ability, aka you press it, the gcd gets triggered and you are fueled with healing energy and you get an area indicator to place something as an ogcd immediately after (basically GCD Cure III turns into OGCD Cure III) and everyone within the placed circle gets healed instantly. That way you don't need to select any targets and it still fulfills the role of Cure III. I don't know how something like that would work in action tho but I think it could be super fun.

[Semirhage]

I think it's weird how the game disincentivizes GCD healing.

Hm. I think one of the...well not INtractable, but close enough that it would require lots and lots of reworking, problems with the game disincentivizing GCD healing is that it's ubiquitous. Healing is binary; you've either done enough of it or you haven't, and so healers are often measured on how well they do with the non-binary, pseudo-infinitely scaling part of their activity, i.e. their damage. And FFXIV's free oGCD healing model paves the road for lossless healing. I guess what I'm saying is, it's not just that GCD healing is disincentivized. It's that it's so disincentivized that you'd need to create lots and lots and lots of incentives for it to dig the role out of that hole. The whole role has so much free healing that if, for example, you were to redesign one healer to have DPS loss healing squashed in between damage GCDs (hello pre-Shadowbringers WHM), that healer...well it just sucks. Healers that can do their jobs without losing any damage are going to be flat out superior in basically every scenario. You'd need to bake it into the entire role for it to work, and FFXIV hasn't worked that way since arguably ARR Scholar.

[ForsakenRoe]

Further to Semi's point, remember that recently Sebazy tried doing an EX roulette with just GCD healing sources as WHM and still got a 94 on damage. I'd estimate that, to make 'GCD healing incentivized/needed' you'd have to remove EVERY OGCD we currently have, and ALSO reduce every AOE GCD heal's effectiveness by roughly 30%. And who would be up for a change that says 'oh yeh btw, we made it so that Cure3 is now 400p, Rapture is back down to 300, and now you don't have Bene, Tetra, Asylum, Benison, and Assize is just damage'. You'd get to keep Aquaveil and Temperance though, I guess since they're mitigations rather than heal/shield

It's such an insane level of overhaul required to get 'just increase how much we have to heal' to actually work as a design choice

[Eisi]

Healers that can do their jobs without losing any damage are going to be flat out superior in basically every scenario. You'd need to bake it into the entire role for it to work, and FFXIV hasn't worked that way since arguably ARR Scholar.

That's exactly what I would go for, dps-lossless GCD healing but not infinitely, you still have to heal smart, if you have to heal more than your budget allows, you lose damage.

There's a bit of if in the game already, it's not much tho, but the lily heals, Macrocosm and Pneuma all work like that. Unfortunately Pneuma is on a two minute cooldown and Macrocosm on an astronomical three minute cooldown, those are too much. Also since Rapture and Solace share the same limited resource but Rapture has more raw healing power, Solace becomes a waste.

In my view there's lots of room for design with the healers to make them a lot more fun or what I'd personally consider fun. Having a baseline spell like Broil whose damage you can simply copy onto other effects and spells to make them neutral is I think a great anchor how to design healers with more interesting GCD to GCD action. Single target healing or mitigation being basically locked behind quick target swaps within a less than .5 second window is ironically what I believe makes healers a lot more difficult under the current paradigm.

[Eisi]

Further to Semi's point, remember that recently Sebazy tried doing an EX roulette with just GCD healing sources as WHM and still got a 94 on damage. I'd estimate that, to make 'GCD healing incentivized/needed' you'd have to remove EVERY OGCD we currently have, and ALSO reduce every AOE GCD heal's effectiveness by roughly 30%.

It doesn't need to be needed it just needs to not be a dps loss up to a certain point.

I would make it so and then check how players react. Will they still only ogcd heal or will they organically switch things up just because they can? What is more fun to them? Then I would dial back on the OGCDs if players enjoy GCD healing in a damage neutral fashion.

Fun is really the most important part, if players can optimize the fun out of the experience, they will. So you wanna make fun optimal.