Healer Suggestions Megathread

[Shurrikhan]

Earth stance can replace every offensive spell with an earth theme and all cast times will be 2.5s base, your spells in this stance do the most damage.
Wind stance can replace every offensive spell with a wind theme and all cast times will be 1.5s base, this could be the middle damage stance.
Holy stance can have what we have now, all cast times will be instant, but damage will be scaled lower.

While interesting thematically it would just become “sit in stone stance or you are griefing your party” unless they return to the coils design of lack of hard enrages and high constant damage that they got rid of with gordias

I don't quite get your warrants here, Super, as even without enrage, you still wouldn't spam a low-damage-but-high-mobility action for a greater portion of time than you actually need its mobility, but neither do I get what you're going for with these stances, Aravell.

You'll have effectively replaced Glare with Stone and Dia with a sort of Ruin II or a stutter-step, depending on how much you can get away with. And you'll increase the button cost in doing so from 2 buttons to 4. You gain the ability to trade some damage for some mobility and even more damage for even more mobility, but you also lose the niche that the bundled utility of our DoT previously held (or it ignores all these stance interactions anyways by still always being instant-cast... which has equal waste).

You probably could do something with stance-dancing, but consider what more you could do with it than just fine shades of mobility vs. damage. Moreover, you'd need to consider what you intend the opportunity costs of the stance-swaps themselves should be, if any, as to influence the decision-paths these stances would create. Should players be directly incentivized to rotate elements, or only indirectly?

Finally, are stances even the best way to do this, as compared to simply categorizing different actions by element and having them generate resource or buffs per their element, etc.? For instance, even just in regard to mobility options alone (which I still don't think would be a good idea to focus solely on, to be clear; this is just an example), you could just have any old Water spells grant cast time reduction, stacking for cumulative effect but falling off one stack at a time, while Earth spells do the opposite (allowing you to charge up a DoT to act as up to a 2.5s cast for increased tick potency), and Wind spells simply additionally make the next cast outright instant, etc.

I feel like, in general, 1-2-3 doesn't work with cast times. Note that no Job that exists with a 1-2-3 does so with the buttons having cast times and being subject to interruption.

I agree that a Healer 1-2-3 combo isn't the way to go, but...

A Verstone/Verfire Ready proc isn't consumed by the Verstone/Verfire spell being interrupted, and combo actions likewise are only ended by the completion of the given action (even if it misses) or by the use of a different and specifically combo-breaking action; there is no reason a spell combo should have to somehow work differently.

There are no casted spell combos (there already are spell combos if counting instant casts)... because they have yet to be added, but that they haven't yet been added doesn't prove incompatibility, and the potential for interruption is one thing we can already prove would be a non-factor, as only action completion has ever consumed unlock procs unless specifically using a different and combo-breaking action.

More likely, Casters presently have no combos simply because Casters didn't need to rely on that brand of pretended complexity just to get by.

[Aravell]

I don't quite get your warrants here, Super, as even without enrage, you still wouldn't spam a low-damage-but-high-mobility action for a greater portion of time than you actually need its mobility, but neither do I get what you're going for with these stances, Aravell.

My aim is opportunity cost. Everything in earth stance will be 2.5s base cast time, even your DoT, you will not be able to weave at all in this stance. Swapping stances will be a free OGCD, you will be able to swap freely out of wind and holy stances, but swapping out of earth stance requires you to clip or drop a GCD for an instant lily GCD. The result would be earth most of the time, swapping to wind during burst or certain mechanics so you can actually weave at all, and swapping to holy for mechanics that require extensive movement that cannot be completed by slidecasting.

Slapping a cost to your highest damage output would force you to think about when you can turret safely, make a miscalculation and you have to pay the cost to fix your mistake. It minimally changes how WHM works while also requiring the player to at least think a little bit about when they can do damage and also when they have to weave.

EDIT: Another interesting thought, what if earth stance started at 1.5s base cast but gradually slows you down to 3s base cast time as you stay in the stance, but damage also gradually increases? Wind can start at 2.5s but gradually speeds up to 1.5s if you maintain the stance.

[Shurrikhan]

My aim is opportunity cost. Everything in earth stance will be 2.5s base cast time, even your DoT, you will not be able to weave at all in this stance.

Okay, but consider what considerations are rewarded now vs. what considerations would be rewarded then.

Dia currently fills multiple purposes. (Less than pre-Lilies, with only Regen offering another mobile spell and an 18s duration on that DoT, but still.) Once you remove its mobility, changing that over to a Holy Stance button, you have more fall-back options, but you haven't much added a new tool. Between Dia, Regen, and Lilies, you already had 5 lossless mobile GCDs per minute, increasing by up to 4 per minute per target on which Regen would be worth maintaining.

So now instead of optimizing the mobility value of Dia, you just fall back directly to either 60% cast times or 0% cast times. So you've lost 2 lossless mobile GCDs per minute (or more, if the DoT duration were reduced) while effectively trading Dia's leniency mechanic (diminish loss as duration fades) for this stance's that has a higher minimum cost but a lower maximum cast. But has that actually, then, added a consideration, or merely swapped it, while costing 3 buttons more?

Slapping a cost to your highest damage output would force you to think about when you can turret safely, make a miscalculation and you have to pay the cost to fix your mistake.

Kind of, but consider: If you early to a thereby waste limited mobile CD/DoT, it takes that CD/duration's time to be again able to use the skill losslessly. If you're late to a cast of a DoT/CD because you still had to move for another GCD, you've lost only that small portion of bonus damage.

The larger factor in optimizing turret damage is in allowing for your filler to fill. If you place the weight instead on just the 1 in 12 GCDs, you may occasionally cast it early, but you would have done that even before when using it as a mobility tool instead of an even more immobile one, while the cost of early use (that doesn't optimize its former/now-removed utility value) is removed.

EDIT: Another interesting thought, what if earth stance started at 1.5s base cast but gradually slows you down to 3s base cast time as you stay in the stance, but damage also gradually increases? Wind can start at 2.5s but gradually speeds up to 1.5s if you maintain the stance.

Yeah, something in direction would probably be fine, though you'd have to be all the more considerate of how you want this to be rotated, because you've introduced an opportunity cost to swapping at all. If you have a relatively-punished starting point that builds up to a relatively-rewarded max benefit specific to that stance, then you encourage --at least in itself-- sticking to the same stance. You'll need to add explicit or contextual reasons to nonetheless swap.

I more meant simply the fact that cleric stance was more “acceptable” to the ARR population because coils was never really balanced around healer DPS

It also, for all intents and purposes, wasn't a stance. It didn't change your actions or act as a means to efficiently sort an above-average number of actions into a more manageable bar-space; it just decided between which half of your already-available actions you wanted to waste your access to. It was shit, even before accounting for its terrible implementation (couldn't properly queue the release and it didn't scale with GCD speed, punishing imperfect timing, roundtrip ping, packet loss, and Spell Speed).

It wasn't so much "acceptable" as just... not awful enough for most to care about until they became more familiar with how wasteful, clunky, and utterly unnecessary it was.

But yes, in Aravell's original example, you'd end up with one default/normal stance, and then 1 or 2 stances that would be very infrequently dipped into, much like Monk's Fire/Wind/Earth (which likewise went mostly to waste, especially after 1.x, and which even late-Stormblood only managed to make one-third relevant [swapping between the default of Fire and the rotational stance in Wind... which was only used for a single skill anyways, thereby really just kinda adding 2 apm in bloat rather than adding a real stance]).

[Aravell]

Yeah, something in direction would probably be fine, though you'd have to be all the more considerate of how you want this to be rotated, because you've introduced an opportunity cost to swapping at all. If you have a relatively-punished starting point that builds up to a relatively-rewarded max benefit specific to that stance, then you encourage --at least in itself-- sticking to the same stance. You'll need to add explicit or contextual reasons to nonetheless swap.

What if I revise it to have synergistic effects in the vein of BRD?

Earth
- Grants [Earth]
- Heightened MP costs
- Base cast time of 1.5s, gradually increases to 3s
- Damage gradually increases over time
([Wind] effect: Caps the base cast time at 2s)
([Holy] effect: Reduces MP costs slightly)

Wind
- Grants [Wind]
- Slightly reduced damage
- Base cast time of 2.5s, gradually decreases to 1.5s
- Grants a lily on entering stance
([Earth] effect: Nullifies damage penalty)
([Holy] effect: Reduces lily charge time on every cast of the filler)

Holy
- Grants [Holy]
- Reduced damage
- Instant casts
- Increases healing potency and MP refresh
([Earth] effect: Reduces the damage penalty)
([Wind] effect: Reduces global recast time to 2s)

With these changes, you can't just sit in earth stance the entire time or it'll eat your entire MP pool. You also have the options of entering earth after wind for faster casts or entering after holy so you can stay in earth stance longer with the MP cost reduction. You also wouldn't want to sit in either of the other stances for too long since it reduces your damage, but both other stances also have a reason for use. Wind if you need a lily/want faster casts in earth, and holy if you need extra healing power or MP/want to stay in earth longer.

Thoughts?

[Shurrikhan]

What if I revise it to have synergistic effects in the vein of BRD?
<snip>
Thoughts?

About to hit the hay, so will have to look over this in depth later. I'd recommend simplifying faintly and clarifying significantly.

If making any revisions to the overall MP system, that'd be worth noting (to shape feedback), since MP usage varies so heavily with GCD heals. (A filler attack is about 233-MP-negative [relative to MP generated passively over that GCD], while a Cure III is 1333-MP-negative; WHM generates ~9300 MP per minute and already spends 8000 MP per minute through offense and Lilies alone, leaving only 1300 MP per minute sustainably for healing)

Other immediate notes: You can't reasonably offer a per-X-seconds resource on an CD-less oGCD unless the opportunity cost of swaps would be enough to offset the generation of that free resource. I'd recommend, unlike Bard songs, not relying on locking stance-swaps behind CDs if you want this to feel accessible and fluid.

[Aravell]

About to hit the hay, so will have to look over this in depth later. I'd recommend simplifying faintly and clarifying significantly.

It's just a general framework of an idea at the moment, I haven't had time to flesh it out, just wanted to see what people would think about the idea of stance swap gameplay.

Other immediate notes: You can't reasonably offer a per-X-seconds resource on an CD-less oGCD unless the opportunity cost of swaps would be enough to offset the generation of that free resource. I'd recommend, unlike Bard songs, not relying on locking stance-swaps behind CDs if you want this to feel accessible and fluid.

The idea if for it to be accessible at any time, there would be no cooldown, you'd just use the stance that you need at the moment according to what you need done. I added the lily generation because I ran out of ideas, WHM as it is now is very limited in systems that could have interactions with buffs. All in all, this is just a rough framework, there's not really any numbers behind it because I haven't had time to crunch the numbers. Would still be interested in your thoughts on the framework though.

[Shurrikhan]

Wind
- Grants [Wind]
- Slightly reduced damage
- Base cast time of 2.5s, gradually decreases to 1.5s
- Grants a lily on entering stance
([Earth] effect: Nullifies damage penalty)
([Holy] effect: Reduces lily charge time on every cast of the filler)?

It's just a general framework of an idea at the moment, I haven't had time to flesh it out, just wanted to see what people would think about the idea of stance swap gameplay.



The idea if for it to be accessible at any time, there would be no cooldown, you'd just use the stance that you need at the moment according to what you need done. I added the lily generation because I ran out of ideas, WHM as it is now is very limited in systems that could have interactions with buffs. All in all, this is just a rough framework, there's not really any numbers behind it because I haven't had time to crunch the numbers. Would still be interested in your thoughts on the framework though.

Again, you cannot then let a CD-less oGCD instantly grant a resource that would otherwise take 20 seconds to charge unless the damage to be gained from staying in your Earth stance would somehow outperform having nigh-infinite damage-neutral healing GCDs / 12800-52000 extra free healing potency per minute.

You'll need to give some approximation of the time it takes to reach the full effect of each stance's advantage for me to have any idea as to how frequent these swaps would likely be optimal for a given output in a given context.


Right now, it the gameplay implications fork with whether or not you hugely buff Earth's damage bonus as it goes from a 2.5s cast time to 3s cast time.

If it does, you'll be slated to force people to double-weave Wind and Earth stance each oGCD gap (assuming near-zero latency and no Spell Speed, so they can fit both animations into each 1.5s GCD gap) so long as the healing to be produced by those free Lilies wouldn't be excessive, and to otherwise stay in Earth stance while just using Lily heals for mobility.

If it doesn't, you'll be pushed to always swap out of Earth before it exceeds a 2.5s cast time, because that would be a DPS loss to have to spend 120% of a GCD on a less than proportionate damage increase relative to the buff present alongside the 2.5s cast time.


In either case, you're still looking at one dominant stance (Earth), a backup (Wind, which has better synergy with Earth than does Holy, unless you force even heals / Solace & Rapture to be long casts under Earth), and a backup to the backup (Holy). It wouldn't likely feel like a compelling system between the three, at least insofar as your framework has progressed so far.

[Calysto]

something something spaghetti code : can't use if/else statement to check if a proc/combo is active...

[Supersnow845]

snip

I more meant simply the fact that cleric stance was more “acceptable” to the ARR population because coils was never really balanced around healer DPS

The stance design in the above post wouldn’t work terribly effectively in a coils world either but would be far less offensive in that type of content because healer DPS wasn’t explicitly factored into the DPS check, you still don’t need the mobility more just that it would be less offensive if someone was doing it

I probably worded that badly

[Renathras]

A Verstone/Verfire Ready proc isn't consumed by the Verstone/Verfire spell being interrupted,

I didn't say that it did? I said no Job has a combo system where parts of the combo (things that proc a further step in a chain) have cast times which can be interrupted if the player has to move, is knocked back, etc. I didn't say anything about procs being consumed due to interruption...
(You know how I mention from time to time some of your disagreements with me are based on things I never said? This would be an example of such a thing.)

As to combos being broken - this seems to be something that varies wildly by Job. On GNB, the AOE combo and single target combo will break each other, but Gnashing Fang's combo breaks neither, but is broken by both. On PLD, the 1-2-3 isn't broken by either using Holy Spirit or Atonement (or Clemency), but on RDM, the 1-2-3 is broken by literally any GCD action they execute that isn't the next step of the combo. There seems to be no actual rhyme or reason, much less a uniform standard, to it all.

The only Spells used in combo actions are Instant casts. So the fantasy of a 1-2-3 with each spell having a cast time/different cast time is unlikely. For example, if they gave SGE a 1-2-3, it would work like MCH's 1-2-3 does, like as not.

"(there already are spell combos if counting instant casts)" - I specifically mentioned this: SMN's 1-2 Ifrit charge combo are classified as Spells but they are instant casts.

They could add them, that's true, but it's unlikely they will for that reason. The reason Casters never had them is because their spells having cast times was considered the complexity of the rotation vs non-Casters actions all being instant but needing to have a positional and/or order to them.