Healer role design change?

[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.

[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...

[Semirhage]

The solution to anyone with common sense is 'buff WHM to be as good as AST and SCH'. SE's 'solution' was to kneecap SCH and AST down to WHM, because WHM is the 'face of healing' and if that's bland as hell, everything needs to be bland as hell to match

I'm always gonna butt heads with you here, but that's the most never going to happen thing of all the things that will never happen. Square has made it clear that WHM's "identity" is The Boring One That Sucks. If you bring back Stormblood healers, AST and SCH will simply resume their collective status as the Overpowered Ones Who Are The Best At Everything. "Bringing WHM up" in Stormblood's paradigm is waaaay more than potencies. The other two could mitigate in several different ways. And had a bunch of free burst heals and regens. And party damage buffs. AOE Esuna. MP refresh. Excellent personal damage. WHM was missing entire categories of personal capability that the other two had in spades, plus they could handily cover the vanilla blandness that WHM brought to the table.

I'd love a well-designed WHM that had actual utility. But as we've seen, Square would rather destroy the entire role than give WHM so much as a fecking raidbuff. "They just need to bring WHM up a bit" is what was bandied about the forums a lot back in Stormblood. It was also not even close to true given how OP AST/SCH was.

[ForsakenRoe]

"Bringing WHM up" in Stormblood's paradigm is waaaay more than potencies. The other two could mitigate in several different ways. And had a bunch of free burst heals and regens. And party damage buffs. AOE Esuna. MP refresh. Excellent personal damage. WHM was missing entire categories of personal capability that the other two had in spades, plus they could handily cover the vanilla blandness that WHM brought to the table.

Remember, the idea isn't 'revert to 4.0 wholesale', it's 'take inspiration from design of 4.0 re: rotations, while keeping the improvements on QOL/useability that 5/6.0 brought, ie Lilies, Divination being a predictable raidbuff (better for balancing/less damage swing), etc'. Going back to 4.0 wholesale would mean, for example, removing Art of War (to mirror Miasma 2) and Energy Drain, and nobody wants to have that happen again. I'm going to assume SE would leave AST as the current 'Diurnal only' now that we have SGE, even if I got my way and had 4.0 style design come back for the 'HW three'. As such, to address each of the things that made SCH/AST OP and WHM 'not good and also very bad in SB':

Mit: Either add Protect as a 60s CD that mirrors CU on AST (upgrading to PI at later levels to save hotbar space), or drop Temperance to a 1min CD, shortening it's duration a little (to 15s) if needed.

Free burst healing/regens: Lilies being reworked addresses this somewhat. AST gets an average of 600p of healing every 20s via rotating it's current OGCDs (CO/CU/Star). WHM gets 400 per 20s, with it going to 600 with PI. We have to remember, SB's version of PI was not good either, and has since been made more useable. It also has Asylum for 900p total. Lilybell is the big thing that can be looked at IMO. A 3min CD that gives 1000p for instant detonation, up to 2000p if all 5 stacks are popped 'properly' as it were. But it's direct competitor is Macrocosmos, capable of deleting certain mechanics (though I imagine they're going to be very wary of how they design hp-to-1 style mechs going forward because of it). I think if they change Lilybell to be a 120s CD with 4 stacks, or a 90s with 3 stacks (and delete the penalty for early detonation), the skill would feel so much better to use. Macro remains with the niche of 'it can delete mechanics sometimes' and Lilybell gains a niche of 'it's up twice as often'. You'd be able to rotate, every 45s, between Asylum and a 3stack Lilybell, for 2100 potency per 90s before even touching Lilies. Lilybell would also have a seperate 'niche' of sorts, of the versatility of choosing how to do it's healing. You can pop it upfront for burst, you can leave it to get even distribution of pulses (ie for a DOT). Macro doesn't have that, you choose when it gives you the burst of healing, but you can't split that burst up into smaller amounts, meaning less agency in the healing it provides

Party damage buffs: WHM got a solid showing in SHB when it's personal damage was so strong that it was not only outstripping party buffs, but also some of the tanks, this is again a numbers thing. I don't think giving WHM a raidbuff changes anything in either direction. SAM exists fine and has no raidbuff, yeh it drops from it's top spot as everyone gets gear sometimes, and other times not. BLM is the same, often hanging around in the top 3 without having a raidbuff. Just requires SE to be good at tuning numbers which.. yeh, could be an issue I guess. Definitely not possible with 4.0 AST (as it was then), but with something like what I've put in that other thread (ST cards with roughly equal contribution to damage, Divination as the raidwide buff, thereby making it's damage output 'predictable' from a balance perspective), it should be possible to balance WHM against it a lot easier compared to the insanely swing-y damage of a 4.0 AST

AOE Esuna: Doesn't exist anymore, but if it were to come back I'd imagine it'd be on WHM if anyone (as a lily spender), since SCH has Expedient now as a 'cool weird utility thing'. If AOE Esuna came back on SCH, I dunno what I'd do for WHM. The first thing that comes to mind is a Raise skill that has a long CD (like, 5+ min), but raises the target with no weakness (or if they have weakness, doesn't turn it into brink of death). People would complain that 'my utility only good for prog' but I could say the same about something like Neutral Sect, you don't actually 'want' to use it because it only works on GCD heals

MP refresh: Addressed with Thin Air and the damage-neutral-Misery change, we now save 1600MP per min due to prep/firing a Misery. Every time they reduce Assize's CD it helps a little too. SB WHM's MP economy was not great, and HW was even worse, but now it's been helped a lot. If needs be, we can have a trait added somewhere that says that Thin Air affects the next 3 spells instead of one. If they added my ideas we'd be getting +500 each time we casted the big AOE heal I made too (the one that grants you a Quake/Tornado/Flood cast) but hey, a quick-and-dirty fix can be to just increase Assize's restore amount

Excellent personal damage: Personal-damage wise WHM is on the right track in relation to AST and SCH, its higher than them (in personal damage) which, since it has no raidbuff, is where it should be. But this is once again a case of 'can SE balance a non-raidbuff class versus one that has raidbuffs', and it's doubly precarious because AST is so heavy into raidbuffing in terms of it's identity, it's like comparing DNC and MCH. SHB shows they're capable, whether intentional or by fluke, of making WHM be competitive even without having it's own raidbuff

If you were to ask me 'do you believe its possible to have SB style design, and for the healers to be well balanced against each other?' I'd say 'yes it is absolutely possible'. If you asked 'do you believe it's possible for SE to achieve this', I'd hesitate before answering, and I'm not sure which way I'd answer it. I want to believe that if they put their mind to it and decided 'this is the way we are going with healers', they'd get the numbers right. The problem is that they don't want to go that way designwise, else they'd never have done the SHB changes in the first place

6.2k characters i done did a Ren

[ty_taurus]

Mit: Either add Protect as a 60s CD that mirrors CU on AST (upgrading to PI at later levels to save hotbar space), or drop Temperance to a 1min CD, shortening it's duration a little (to 15s) if needed.

In general, I've started to develop the preference of really cutting total actions down in favor of making the actions that stay more frequent. For example, I really like Haima and Panhaima. I think they're interesting, but I'd rather see them become 60 second cooldowns instead, and I'd be happy to remove tools like some or all of the -choles in order to justify that much accessibility. So I'd much rather see something like Temperance drop to 60 seconds or less even if that means reducing the effects somewhat. Adding charges also helps. For example, why does Scholar need both Indomitability and Fey Blessing? Why does it need Whispering Dawn and Sacred Soil and Fey Illumination?

I want to see each kit curated down to the most interesting unique tools, and use that extra space to add ways to interact with those tools more. For example, why not cut Asylum and Plenary Indulgence completely and make Liturgy a permanent object you place. Every time you hit Liturgy with an AoE heal, you can activate it to trigger an OGCD AoE heal, and it can store up to 5 charges this way? One action releases all charges at once for HP burst recovery, another grants you a buff that automatically consumes a single charge to heal a smaller amount when you take damage (mimicking the current Liturgy effect), and maybe you have a third action--a DPS spell that causes all charges to hit enemies with a damage down effect for added mitigation, or something o that effect? This could also resolve the Assize problem. Instead of Assize healing additionally, it adds a charge to your Liturgy. Maybe you can spend your charges to either heal, or

[ForsakenRoe]

For example, why does Scholar need both Indomitability and Fey Blessing? Why does it need Whispering Dawn and Sacred Soil and Fey Illumination?

Soil's for mit, idk why they added the regen in SHB. I thought it was dumb at the time too. For Indom/Blessing, I've said ages ago that I'd probably remove Blessing, and rework Deploy so that the Fairy does a copy of the skill you use, from a list. Indom would make the fairy do Fey Indom (functionally equivalent to Blessing atm), Deploy Adlo would be a double ST shield on one target for super mit on a tankbuster, Deploy Succor would be current Adlo-Deploy, bigger partywide shielding, and Deploy Excog would be for 'I really don't want this tank to get instaslapped by an auto and die after this TB' I guess

As for a merged Illum/WDawn, I think you are describing Physis2, but jokes aside, yeh I'm not a massive fan of Fey Illumination's existence either, I'd rather have lost it in the prune than Rouse for example

[Aravell]

Rework Deploy so that the Fairy does a copy of the skill you use, from a list. Indom would make the fairy do Fey Indom (functionally equivalent to Blessing atm), Deploy Adlo would be a double ST shield on one target for super mit on a tankbuster, Deploy Succor would be current Adlo-Deploy, bigger partywide shielding, and Deploy Excog would be for 'I really don't want this tank to get instaslapped by an auto and die after this TB' I guess

This system would actually be very interesting on SGE. Imagine if:
- Dosis is a straight heal on Kardia target
- Eukrasian Dosis is a regen on Kardia target
- Dyskrasia pulses an AoE heal out from Kardia target
- Phlegma places a shield on Kardia target
- Pneuma pulses an AoE shield out from Kardia target