Healer role design change?

[ForsakenRoe]

I think the most fun I have ever had on a healer in any MMO was Rift's Chloromancer, which was a healer who had to be proactive because most of its healing was done through dealing damage and debuffing the enemy. It had spot heals, but they couldn't cover the entire demand for healing. I was excited for Sage when I heard it was "deal damage to heal" but it turns out Kardia is basically just a glorified regen on the tank.

Or Discipline Priest in WOW, which is a healer that has to be proactive because most of it's healing is done through dealing damage and debuffing the enemy (Smite reduces the damage of the next autoattack by a flat amount iirc). It has to use skills to apply 'Atonement' to allies, which marks them for the transfer of damage>healing, but it has a fairly long CD on the skills that apply Atonement in an AOE, it only applies to 5 allies (rough in a 20man mythic), and the durations of those AOE-applied Atonements is lower, so gameplay involves 'ramping', ie, applying the Atonements and extending their duration ahead of the raidwide damage, and then doing essentially a 2min burst window, to maximise the damage that is transferred into healing

Instead we have Kardia, which is 'the old Embrace Macro'.

For removing obsolete healing tools like Cure1/Benefic1, they should have done that back in SB when they started consolidating the damage skills (ie, Stone1/2/3/4 upgrade into each other), it's insane to me that it's over 5 years on and they still haven't done it, who's using Cure 1 in endgame content? As for Sage though, the issue with Chloromancer and Discipline is that if you get overwhelmed and cannot keep up, there's not really a fall-back per se. Our classes have a Medica they can spam if panic is happening. I'd say the devs should have realized this 'liferaft' exists for the casual players, and made SGE healing more technical. After all, if a healer is struggling to keep up with the technical damage>healing gameplay of SGE and starts to flounder, they can spam Prognosis until the party's stable again, at the cost of some of their damage. Couple of us who have suggested reworks to the class even go one step further, and make Prognosis cost zero MP! The only 'cost' it'd have in our designs is that it costs you a GCD of damage. But of course, SE's design team is allergic to the idea of nuance, complexity, etc at the moment, so instead we have Scholar 2

[Shurrikhan]

Or Discipline Priest in WOW, which is a healer that has to be proactive because most of it's healing is done through dealing damage and debuffing the enemy (Smite reduces the damage of the next autoattack by a flat amount iirc).

As someone who's played quite a bit of Disc Priest both before and after its rework towards a vampiric healer... I never quite got the hype. Ultimately, it was at best just a healer with slightly better than average combined DPS + HPS in situations with damage-window-exploitability... at the cost of being far less able to burst-damage or burst-heal. For all its indirectness, it's really just very... flat.

Tbf, there are still some periods where it's done better than others, gameplay-wise. When it's had far more bankability and dynamism in its DPS, it's at least also had some part of that in its heals... since they're one and the same.

And of course, syncing modifiers (i.e., by placing on-ally buffs from which they receive healing at X% of your damage dealt) to potency (your actual attacks' potency that may fall within those buff windows) always has its appeal, even if... that's essentially just the likes of Twin Snakes but ally-by-ally and doesn't feel like anything especially healer-esque.


But, I feel like the main thing Sage can take away from Disc Priest isn't that "damage-based healing is cool," but rather that "damage-based healing is really boring unless you have significant controllable dynamism to your damage and windows around which to sync it." Case in point -- Kardia being basically just a Regen with a benefit of being oGCD but whose existence squishes the job's GCD-based healing burst. Make it instead a % and give SGE some serious damage bankability (weaker filler, but more frequent and layered burst actions that needn't just be used on CD), though, and it'd actually be an interesting mechanic in practice.

[vetch]

But, I feel like the main thing Sage can take away from Disc Priest isn't that "damage-based healing is cool," but rather that "damage-based healing is really boring unless you have significant controllable dynamism to your damage and windows around which to sync it."

I'm having a real hard time thinking of ways to fit a genuine 'your damage amount determines your heal amount' healer into a 'save every damage cooldown for 60/120s windows or you're griefing' combat design.

[Shurrikhan]

I'm having a real hard time thinking of ways to fit a genuine 'your damage amount determines your heal amount' healer into a 'save every damage cooldown for 60/120s windows or you're griefing' combat design.

Simple.

Consider: What's the average frequency of an oGCD heal, which otherwise layers your healing 'burst' available? (Hint: It's not something bankable all the way to every 120s window.)

So long as you have a fair amount of dynamism outside of what can be banked for the 2-minute raidbuffs cycle, there's no issue with having a damage-based-healer even in a raidbuff-cycle-obsessed meta.
And, if a damage-based-healer were to offer even half the amount of healing control as a traditional healer, it would necessarily have that degree of outside-2-min-bursts dynamism.

It's a non-issue, as long as the job doesn't insist on leaving the 'damage-based healing' component as barebone and poorly situated as it is on SGE (where, again, it's more a variant of a periodic heal, not damage-based-healing, since it in no way scales with damage -- only with offensive casts).

[AnotherPerson]

I'm having a real hard time thinking of ways to fit a genuine 'your damage amount determines your heal amount' healer into a 'save every damage cooldown for 60/120s windows or you're griefing' combat design.

Here's some different methods, but could be used together if need be:

1. Introduce resource generation for damage that heals skills to be consistent enough to use the skills to avoid overcapping but also competitive enough to be your primary source of healing (ex: rework addersgall to have a damage component and reduce free oGCD healing library).
2. Make majority of the damage skills tied to healing with Kardia & make Kardia the ideal method to heal. The way Sage will primarily recover HP rapidly is to utilize damage abilities to activate Kardia in quick succession. If you burn all your skills on a burst window, you have to spend a lot more GCDs with Eukrasian Prognosis / Eukrasian Diagnosis after for more potent healing per GCD -- which will result in a DPS loss (Dependent on having consistent and frequent amounts of unavoidable damage in encounters)
3. Make certain damage skills with healing components not be affected by raid buffs, but can be banked/stored past its initial cooldown so the primary focus is to use it towards healing and avoid overcapping. Think Assize but with 2 charges and cannot be affected by raid buffs. This can also work for skills that are dependent on storing charges to expend them all at once (like PvP Bard's Empyreal Arrow, but in the sage's case, each stored attack charge also heals, so it can be used as a burst heal as well)


The first two choices allow for more dynamic decision-making, the latter method directly removes the issue of saving damage cooldowns for 60/120s windows only. These windows can align, but their intended usage will not be limited by the raidbuff meta. Conversely, the DPS of said skills would be have to be buffed to compensate, but it will allow for a more healing-centric focus rather than strictly a DPS one (though banking charges to help make multiple small DPS checks in mechanics could also work with this type of design rather than one large enrage DPS check).

Edit:
Speaking of DPS checks, why doesn't SE just make a lot more smaller DPS checks between mechanics rather than focus solely on one large enrage check to break the raidbuff meta? With smaller soft-enrage DPS checks that can also double as a heal check, you'd have a lot less focus in trying to coordinate every job to specifically save everything for a raidbuff. For buff-oriented jobs, this can make them have more flexible buff windows as well.

[Aravell]

Speaking of DPS checks, why doesn't SE just make a lot more smaller DPS checks between mechanics rather than focus solely on one large enrage check to break the raidbuff meta? With smaller soft-enrage DPS checks that can also double as a heal check, you'd have a lot less focus in trying to coordinate every job to specifically save everything for a raidbuff. For buff-oriented jobs, this can make them have more flexible buff windows as well.

They did the whole smaller checks in between raid buff windows for TOP. It made certain groups drop SCH/AST for SGE/WHM or drop BRD/DNC for MCH because you can't get a 2 minute alignment during p4, which causes raid buff jobs to diminish in value. The only way to fix the 2 minute meta is to diversify buff timers again, because if you can't get alignment in certain phases, the value of buff jobs are heavily diminished in that phase, which means some people might be inclined to drop them for other jobs that can bank mini-bursts on off minutes, such as WHM (Afflatus Misery) and SGE (Phlegma). It ends up not exactly fixing anything, it just swings the pendulum the other way.

Of course, they might be able to make it work in a less tightly tuned fight and make sure it doesn't cause buff jobs to have issues.

[AnotherPerson]

They did the whole smaller checks in between raid buff windows for TOP. It made certain groups drop SCH/AST for SGE/WHM or drop BRD/DNC for MCH because you can't get a 2 minute alignment during p4, which causes raid buff jobs to diminish in value. The only way to fix the 2 minute meta is to diversify buff timers again, because if you can't get alignment in certain phases, the value of buff jobs are heavily diminished in that phase, which means some people might be inclined to drop them for other jobs that can bank mini-bursts on off minutes, such as WHM (Afflatus Misery) and SGE (Phlegma). It ends up not exactly fixing anything, it just swings the pendulum the other way.

Of course, they might be able to make it work in a less tightly tuned fight and make sure it doesn't cause buff jobs to have issues.

Definitely agree with diversifying buff timers. For TOP in particular, I meant less for "phases" as an individual DPS check. Those phases usually lead to hard enrages either way if you don't make the check on killing the boss by a certain time, with no leeway. Rather than have a hard enrage check that wipes the party after a certain amount of time passes in a phase, having multiple smaller soft DPS checks in mechanics would be akin to spawning high-HP dragon adds that target both tanks to do Akh Morn continuously for instance. A couple adds can do big unavoidable AoE attacks, a couple adds can focus on big ST stack marker attacks. It's not one attack that will directly wipe the party, but a lot of consecutive attacks that whither the party away in various ways. These adds will eventually overwhelm your healers if the damage happens for too long as healers have a finite amount of resources at a given time, so the DPS check comes in making sure the a couple of adds die fast enough. The boss could also be executing mechanics in the meantime and periodically respawning adds (which puts a race against time on how much you can spend on just adds alone). This way, there is a desire to take down the adds asap to relieve the burden on your healers who would have to reserve some resources for mechanics and dig deeper into their MP pool to handle the heal check, but also a desire to push DPS for a phase as well because the boss will still spew out more adds as long as they are alive. However, there's less of the "instant wipe enrage" situation where DPS is the only thing that matters. Now it would be how the party best balance DPS, mitigation, and healing based on party composition to push through the phase when the damage is much more frequent but coming from multiple different sources.

In this way, both buff jobs and non-buff jobs should be equally valuable because there's value in having both mini-bursts to take down adds to focus on the boss's HP bar and big buff windows to rapidly deplete the HP of certain adds / boss when the fight starts to drag on and reach the next raidbuff window.

[vetch]

Simple.

Consider: What's the average frequency of an oGCD heal, which otherwise layers your healing 'burst' available? (Hint: It's not something bankable all the way to every 120s window.)

So long as you have a fair amount of dynamism outside of what can be banked for the 2-minute raidbuffs cycle, there's no issue with having a damage-based-healer even in a raidbuff-cycle-obsessed meta.

Either I don't understand, or that's not really dynamic control of your damage profile. It's just the overcap management that all jobs have to do to optimize, i.e. not letting it sit unused such that it costs you a use over the course of the fight, and not using it so late that you don't have all charges ready for the burst window.

The way you're presenting it, your DPS healer would be able to pour on self-buffs/oGCDs to increase damage-healing when needed. But in a damage-obsessed game with tight DPS checks, wouldn't you be under pressure to manage them for max DPS with minimal consideration of their heal value, while leaving any uncovered healing to a co-healer who'll still have a bunch of free oGCDs or lilies with no opportunity cost, unlike yours? Similar to the situation with Aetherflow. You can spend it on heals, but if you're optimizing to beat an enrage, you don't want to.

[RylienSamildanach]

Personally I am for that in 7.0 they drastically change the role of the Astrologian, going from Healer to Dps Magic buffer (caster), and that instead they release a Job Healer (a real one), I think that many many people would be for it, given the current situation of the astrologist.

Fingers crossed, even if I don't really believe it.
We know that with the Dancer it works, so I don't see why the Astrologist wouldn't work anyway and it would save them from doing a "Time Mage", frankly, everyone would be happy that way and it would be much more easy for them...

[ForsakenRoe]

The way you're presenting it, your DPS healer would be able to pour on self-buffs/oGCDs to increase damage-healing when needed. But in a damage-obsessed game with tight DPS checks, wouldn't you be under pressure to manage them for max DPS with minimal consideration of their heal value, while leaving any uncovered healing to a co-healer who'll still have a bunch of free oGCDs or lilies with no opportunity cost, unlike yours? Similar to the situation with Aetherflow. You can spend it on heals, but if you're optimizing to beat an enrage, you don't want to.

I suppose it all depends really, on if the healing done outside of raidbuffs (supposedly suboptimal) removes the need to GCD heal at a later point. For example, if you put all your burst in raidbuffs cos 'muh parse' and then that means you have to use Prognosis later after a raidwide, that's gonna cost you more damage than saving some kit, then using that burst damage to convert to healing outside of raidbuffs to remove that Prognosis, right? The cohealer isn't gonna be able to cover everything, unless you're chadding the hell out of them and forcing them to Medica, this all sounds suspiciously like 'optimization' though

We have Energy Drain as a good example. We use Indom or Soil, even though it costs us 100p damage, because the alternative is being forced to Succor, and lose 295p of damage