G-give it Back T---T; !! (Scholar Edition)

[Renathras]

I don't know if you're being cheeky, but I'll take this in good faith... I'm probably making a mistake, but...

Not to put too fine a point on it, but he's being cheeky. That's a go-to for some people who haven't figured out tanking and healing are inherently different to suggest Healers need to be DPSers. Though I don't think it's in bad faith, per se - that is, the people using it, and Ty being included in that, genuinely see it as a persuasive and valid argument. I just feel lit leaves off some fundamental differences. This same conversation came up in the Tank forum, and the general consensus there was that Tanks are ultimately going to be modified Melee in most games, trading in damage CDs and complexities in rotation for defensive ones instead, while Healers are ALMOST always more like very slimmed down Casters, with very very basic damage spells of extremely low complexity that don't distract from their main mission of watching party health bars, which seems to be more generally considered to be more mentally taxing than Tanks managing their own defensive CDs (since they're only worried about themselves, what the boss is doing, and what the boss will be doing shortly while healers are worried about themselves, what the boss is doing, what the boss will be doing shortly, the rest of the party's health, party member mistakes, and what resources they have remaining to deal with issues, as well as needing to somewhat quickly respond to other party member mistakes and not be locked into things like rotations or burst phases.

Damage is the central aspect to gameplay that revolves around combat. That is an unavoidable truth to any game that features combat anywhere, and no role can fully escape that reality.

I don't think this is really true.

Everquest was a game focused on combat, yet Clerics would routinely be set in a chain casting big healing spells over and over again on the main tank then resting to regenerate mana. While that is a more extreme example, it's hardly the only one. Holy Paladins (healers) in WoW's Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King era (widely considered the height of the game's expansion history) routinely engaged in combat casting Holy Light over and over again on the MT due to extremely high mana efficiency big heals with a high crit chance and high chance to refund mana (on crits), and in Wrath, with Beacon of Light, the ability to heal both the MT and OT far more efficiently and consistently than any other healer, at the cost of them having rather limited AOE healing options for the raid team.

EQ and WoW were and are both combat focused games. And while they've adapted over time, these were functional systems for literally years, and some players didn't really enjoy them changing. So it seems that roles can, in fact, "fully escape that 'reality'", as it were. Now, one thing worth noting is, in both cases, some classes within the role didn't necessarily function that way. In EQ, Druids and Shaman were considered weaker at the healer role for the MT but were able to be functional party healers with some utility in other roles (moderate damage, buffing/debuffing), and in WoW...well, during that era, Healers really didn't DPS much because the mana cost of their damage spells were prohibitive. Hence "wanding" on Priest. But the options opened up over time.

Still, the point stands that a healer role not built around DPSing and DPS rotations is something entirely doable in our reality in games that revolve around combat.

Reiner is 100% correct here, there is physically only so much healing uptime they can introduce before it overwhelms the average DF healer

This really isn't functionally true.

YES, if they gave out Savage levels of damage raidwides every 10 seconds, that would overwhelm DF Healers. But the reality is that they could do raidwides every 10 seconds that do DF levels of raidwide damage (think the average 4 man dungeon boss) and Medica spamming WHMs could heal it without difficulty. There's a huge gulf between what we have and what we could have that would reward Healers using efficient heals, but still allow weak Healer players to complete the content just hitting Medica over and over at the cost of efficiency for the party. That's not a hard system.

Likewise, for high end players doing high end content (the only content they won't be bored in), the damage profile can be far higher (Savage, Ultimates) since you aren't worried about DF "Casual Timmy" in that content anyway.

EDIT:

For the people who think Aetherflow should only be used for healing, I only have one thing to say to them.

SGE is right there. You can play it. Addersgall is purely for healing.

Strictly speaking: SCH was first.

Honestly, at this point, they should just remove Faerie Gauge. Aetherpact is the only thing that uses it, just make it a toggle that sacrifices some of Eos' independent action for slightly focused healing. Make it just a bit more potent than Embrace spam for the trade-off of being locked to one target. If Faerie Gauge became "the healing gauge", then it would need to be completely redone. It would need to be balanced to give 30 charge per minute on its own, so not require AF spending to use, and would need all the AF spenders moved to it besides ED. This would also require completely reworking and rebalancing Dissipation, if not outright removing it, since the way it currently works with Faerie Gauge (you don't generate any during it) wouldn't work well. Doubly so if Eos was the one casting the spells, since you could easily lock yourself out of things like Soil for long periods of time, which would make SCH's healing kit nearly unusuable. At that point, AF would just be "the Energy Drain gauge", which would just be stupid, and would be removed, and the overall changes here would require far more than just removing ED from AF right now would.

And worries about "overcapping AF" are really kind of silly when you consider there's literally no downside/penalty to doing so other than "feelsbad", which is already an issue people have with...Energy Drain spending AF.

Granted, AF is a dates system, so just outright removing it and moving everything else over to Faerie Gauge and removing Energy Drain from the game at that point (since it would have no reason to exist) would make sense, but that would probably be even more upsetting to the pro-damage wing of this discussion...

On the flipside, as someone in the Sage camp, I hate the -choles. I wanted my main method of healing to be through interacting with Kardia, not standard OGCD heals that have ridiculously short cooldowns on a resource system more generous than Sweden's healthcare system.

I kind of agree with Ty on this.

SGE is already set up for WoW Disc Priest type "heal by doing damage" systems. Even the wording on Kardia/Kardion kind of suggests they thought about doing more with that ability. SGE seems built like it should be healing through Kardia with its oGCDs being more about mitigation/barriers/smoothing damage so that the weaker and slightly more cumbersome Kardia heals could sufficiently keep the party going, not a barrier/shield healer with massive free oGCD healing that rivals WHM in healing throughput while also having far and away more mitigation, as well as more accessible and easy to use mitigation than SCH.

I think you could take Aero from White Mage and Thunder from Black Mage. Good times!

Thunder was only cross-class from patch 2.0 to 2.1. Aero was after that, though. It is funny since a lot of people mention it, but it was only true for all of one patch in the game's history.