Dawntrail Healers need a rework

[TheDustyOne]

Though can you explain the burn system? That was before I played AST. Other than just knowing it exists, I'm not sure the HOW of it other than AST had something like 8-10 abilities that were just about Card play (including Minor Arcana stuffs), and even discounting stuff like Undraw, there seemed to be more going on. Wasn't there something where the cards you burned had different effects on the next card played? Or was the effect always the same, depending on the card? That is, was it "Burn Ewer, next card is AOE" or was it "Burn Card, next Balance is AOE, next Spire has 2x the duration, etc"?

Burn Ewer, next card is AoE is correct there. Royal Road (nicknamed burn because of the animation) would dispel your current card to change up the next card.

Burning Ewer and Spire would make the next card AoE at 50% effectiveness (so Balance would go from 10% to 5%, but on everyone).

Burning Balance and Bole would make the next card 50% stronger (so Balance would be 15% on a single person, Ewer restored 50% more MP, etc.)

Burning Arrow and Spear would double the duration of the next card (so everything would go from 30s to 60s)

And if we didn't like a card, we could Redraw, or convert it to Lady or Lord at random.

Celestial Opposition I believe extended the buff duration from cards in play as well, so that 30s AoE Balance would be 40s instead, and Time Dilation was the single target variant that increased someones card by 15s.

[Sebazy]

It's also worth noting that og CO and TD could be used to extend Shroud, regens etcetc. Old AST was an intricate beautiful beast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGUMzl2cV0

Even if Creator itself wasn't exactly an all time classic tier, man I had so much fun on AST back then. Putting the work and effort into good CD and card management really allowed you to feel like you were dragging a group along in a way that's just not possible anymore. Plus the card and time extension play was constant. None of this throwing everything into your opener/2 minute window and then AFKing till the next that AST is stuck with now++

[Shurrikhan]

There was no slight of hand. I specified the first because I thought some people might go "it's a raid buff, not a DPS button"

Because Chain Strategem is a raid buff, not a DPS button. Chain Strategem, like Battle Litany, Mug, Battle Voice, Radiant Finale, Searing Light, Embolden, and the like, produces very little of its rDPS through the skill-caster's own exploitation of it. It certainly should not, as you put it...

be thought of like Presence of Mind, Dreadwyrm Trance, Inner Release

...two of which unlock unique skills and all of which depend entirely on one's own exploitation of that buff.

So, yes, having called what is clearly a raid buff anything other than a raid buff is going to look odd, especially if you've previously similarly 'adjusted' otherwise agreed-upon classifications to suggest, say, that Job A's kit has lost less relative to Job B's kit than is commonly thought.

Though can you explain the burn system? That was before I played AST. Other than just knowing it exists, I'm not sure the HOW of it other than AST had something like 8-10 abilities that were just about Card play (including Minor Arcana stuffs), and even discounting stuff like Undraw, there seemed to be more going on. Wasn't there something where the cards you burned had different effects on the next card played? Or was the effect always the same, depending on the card? That is, was it "Burn Ewer, next card is AOE" or was it "Burn Card, next Balance is AOE, next Spire has 2x the duration, etc"?

Originally, you had 3 pairs of Cards, with each pair holding generally opposite effects: Damage [Potency] Cards, Speed [Time] Cards, and Resource [Party] Cards.

Damage Cards increased damage dealt (Balance) or decreased damage taken (Bole) and, if consumed, increased the potency of the next Card played ("Empower").

Speed Cards increased Attack Speed (Arrow) or Ability Recast Speed (Spear) and, if consumed, extended the duration of the next Card played ("Extend").

Resource Cards granted MP (Ewer) or TP (Spire) and, if consumed, expanded your next Card played to affect the whole party, though at reduced effect ("Expand").

It had several tuning issues and Resource Cards can no longer constitute a category in themselves without hefty target disparity (such as by granting gauge or gauge generation), but the fundamental idea is sound enough.

There is an immediately obvious design fork, though:

• On the first path, you favor management of chance by having slightly larger net differences in Card performance and/or making those differences more consistent.
• On the second path, you favor variation by adjusting functionality and/or tuning to create use cases for each card in practice and/or reducing the general net differences between cards (such as by adding a complicating factor like Seals to force diversity in Card types used).

Personally, I slightly favor the second, but the original HW/StB Card systems were the first, though not in nearly so obvious a fashion as the community made things out to be.

"Balance Fishing" in the sense of discarding anything that wasn't Balance after readying an Expand (next Card affects the whole party) was almost never actually optimal (and would require you to be pretty precisely sure of your number of Draws available within the fight). Yes, a speedrun with a higher portion of Expand -> Balance casts would outperform those without, but that's a matter of initial luck, not how well that luck was managed.

In Stormblood, you could also burn a card to just outright conserve it for a spare oGCD Attack (Lord) or Heal (Lady) usable, though only the once per Card burned, at any later time. Though, sadly, which you got was also RNG.

Honestly, the largest issues of the old system are simply that Minor Arcana (burning a Card for a later oGCD attack or heal) and Royal Road (burning a Card for an effect on the next) required an overcommitment for how many layers of RNG an AST was dealing with and that certain cards were a bit overly narrow in their use cases. Both those issues can be fixed, however.

Minor Arcana's issue could have been easily solved by just making 1 of each category always become a Lady (oGCD heal) and one of each category always become a Lord (oGCD attack).

Royal Road's issue could have been easily solved by having it be released manually instead of automatically/unavoidably (once a Royal Road is readied, you need to toggle the created Royal Road on in order to have the next Card consume it).

The Cards' use cases, though, are a bit different, and honestly it might not be worth constraining ourselves to the Card system's original patterns/distributions of effects now that we've lost both TP and Ability Speed as manipulable values.

But, let's say we were to keep something of the original pairing, even if only unified under Seals...

SOLAR

• Balance - The greater of the target's damage or healing taken or damage or healing dealt increases their Attack and Magic Power or Physical and Magical Defense, respectively. Additions fade separately, each over 10 seconds.
  
  
• Bole - Damage dealt to the target is instead split between the target and nearby allies. Damage is split according to the health to which the player would be reduced. (Since the allies take this as a new instance damage, it's effectively double-mitigated.) Only a maximum of 50% of the target's maximum HP can be shared in this manner.
  
  (No, Bole cannot directly kill an ally through the shared damage. A player at 1 HP could not receive any portion of the shared damage. If one of the player would inevitably died from the shared damage, regardless of its distribution, then the player affected by Bole will just take the full amount, wasting much of it to overkill.
  
  Or, heck, maybe next to none of those protections, in order to keep the Spiritlink Totem equivalent more in check.)

CELESTIAL

• Arrow - Increases target's Attack Speed and Movement Speed.
  
  
• Spear - Increase's the recharge speed of the target's abilities and allows target to overcharge their abilities.
  
  Overcharge: Your actions with a recast time greater than the global cooldown can generate additional charge. Partial charges may be spent for partial effect.

LUNAR

• Ewer - The target gains 1% additional MP and HP per second and excess HP the target receives is transferred to and split among nearby applicable allies.
  
  
• Spire - The target's critical strikes increase their and nearby allies' Critical Strike by a small amount, based on the potency of their critical strikes. Additions fade separately, over 10 seconds.

In that layout, general priority would descend from Celestial to Lunar to Solar, but because you want all 3 Seals anyways (I'm assuming a less pitiful Astrodyne or other Seal-spender here), you'd still typically use all three anyways.

That's obviously an untuned spitball, as having access to Spiritlink Totem, a Chain Strategem more reminiscent of a true "Chain" Strategem, etc., on a 30s CD would be a bit much, but the idea there is that each card should feel a bit more thematic and have multiple use cases; even if not every recipient type fits every purpose, there's at least a recipient type and/or purpose for each scenario.

[ForsakenRoe]

You could CO extend 'any buff applied by the AST', that meant not only the usual suspects like your Regens, or 'Luminiferous Aether' (now Lucid) to get more MP, but things like Sprint and even your Potion. Plus, CO stunned enemies for 4s on use

[Renathras]

...

Cool, thanks for that. Was Time Dilation the thing that worked on all your buffs? Like if you had a Card and Regen on someone, it would extend them both?

It's also worth noting that og CO and TD could be used to extend Shroud, regens etcetc. Old AST was an intricate beautiful beast.

Ah, there we go. Thank you. That does sound wild. (To be fair, AST is not the only victim of the 2 min meta...)

Because Chain Strategem...

Irrelevant.
To.
The.
Discussion.

This is the same as that "well akshually...!" in the other thread about the word impossible.

THE POINT was to see how different SB SCH vs EW SMN are in terms of DPS buttons. SINCE BOTH have a raid buff used more or less on CD, the gap between abilities is the same whether we count them both OR do not count them both. And we won't count one but not the other. Thus it is irrelevant. It was irrelevant when the first person mentioned it, and once one person has mentioned it, even if it WAS relevant, there's no reason for several more people to pile on trying to mention the same thing already mentioned. But doubly so when it's irrelevant to the point being made.

.

"AST discussion"

Cool. Thank you for the elaboration.

[Afras]

While I do totally agree that healing oGCDs are way out of hand, I feel like it’s going to be difficult to convince the developers to ever change that.

From their point of view, if they cull oGCDs and move the healing over to GCDs, then newer healers are going to become headless chickens and kill everyone on the planet (even though you don’t have many oGCDs at lower levels lol). Similarly with if they inverted the potencies so gcd was stronger; they’d see it as punishing the newer heals by making them ‘work harder’ to keep everyone healed.

It’s also worth mentioning, they have designed most savage+ content specifically with healers dps’ing in mind. If they had to gcd heal to a much greater extent they’d not be able to hit those ‘maximal dps targets’ they need/are supposed to hit, which might necessitate rebalancing a ton of raid content.
Ironically though that’s kind of the point - people don’t generally want healing to be about ‘hitting maximal dps targets, while using healing abilities to spend as little time and thought as humanly possible on not-dps’ing. But I feel like the devs are going to be super resistant to it because they’ll be like, ‘well, you said you wanted healers to dps!’.

Then there’s also the potential of them going for a ‘you have to have one or the other’ scenario. That is to say, they’ll come with the ultimatum of choosing between ‘good healing’ or ‘more dps’. They’ll say that if we have more healing then healers can’t be expected to dps; if they have more dps, they’ll say they can’t be expected to gcd heal.

I think it could be possible to make GCD healing not a DPS loss. Maybe scholar could double the potency of their next broil if their shield breaks. Sage could have a "damage" kardia that does damage to a target when using GCD healing abilities. MP costs of GCD heals would probably need to be increased to still discourage needlessly spamming heals. These ideas would obviously need tweaks but I think it could be possible to make GCD healing not a DPS loss.

[ty_taurus]

I think it could be possible to make GCD healing not a DPS loss. Maybe scholar could double the potency of their next broil if their shield breaks. Sage could have a "damage" kardia that does damage to a target when using GCD healing abilities. MP costs of GCD heals would probably need to be increased to still discourage needlessly spamming heals. These ideas would obviously need tweaks but I think it could be possible to make GCD healing not a DPS loss.

I don't think it's healthy for every GCD heal to potentially be DPS neutral. It creates an environment where there's not really a "wrong" choice or "right" choice because all roads lead to El Dorado. Having them become neutral under certain conditionals can work, but those should feel somewhat limited.

[Shurrikhan]

I think it could be possible to make GCD healing not a DPS loss. Maybe scholar could double the potency of their next broil if their shield breaks.

None of which would be necessary, though, if the oGCDs weren't so far out of hand as to make GCD heals entirely redundant in most content.

Yes, the GCDs would remain second-priority, but that is fine so long as the buttons actually see use.

An ally dying is cost far more potency than any single lost filler attack.

If you make spammable fall-back heals worth casting even when avoidable, you've merely removed a fail condition and consequent skill expression... more so than you've added choice.

If you want GCD heals to be useful without reducing skill expression, frankly, the biggest thing is just going to be the healing requirements themselves.

Toxicon- or Misery-like refund mechanisms are viable, yes, but also frequently clunky and, if ever applied to anything spammable, inherently capable only of partial refunds without breaking the game's balance.

[TheDustyOne]

It's why I was careful in my redesigns to put the refunds under some time constraint or restriction; Blood Lilies could be gained from Cure > Banish in my WHM, but it would lead to a small potency loss each time from overcapping the Baptism timer (admittedly I think it's too small a loss). Kaustra on my SCH gives back 2 Broils worth, but only after the DoT went through its full duration of 15s. AST had to wait for Double-cast to come off cooldown before you could refund. And my SGE had to spend about 6-7 GCDs to build up enough gauge for its damage neutral heals.

The only time back-to-back GCDs should be a thing is when things have gone south and time needs to be spent recovering, otherwise the goal was about thinking through GCD heals wisely and efficiently rather than rewarding constant topping up.

[Renathras]

I think it could be possible to make GCD healing not a DPS loss. Maybe scholar could double the potency of their next broil if their shield breaks. Sage could have a "damage" kardia that does damage to a target when using GCD healing abilities. MP costs of GCD heals would probably need to be increased to still discourage needlessly spamming heals. These ideas would obviously need tweaks but I think it could be possible to make GCD healing not a DPS loss.

SCH could take a page from old SMN (specifically Egi-Assault) and have Ruin 2 become Ruin 4 whenever they cast Adlo or Succor, maximum 4 charges.

For those who didn't play it, in ShB, SMN had two GCD abilities, Egi-Assault 1 and Egi-Assault 2, both of which could have 2 charges. When using either, the SMN got a buff, "Further Ruin", which would stack up to 4 and which upgraded their Ruin 2 button into Ruin 4, a much stronger attack more powerful than Ruin 3 and instant cast. Over the full 2 min cycle (SMN was 2 min meta before there was 2 min meta), you'd get a total of 8 of these (both Egi-Assaults had a 30 sec CD). This was part of SMN's kit in two key ways, one was maximizing damage when Bahamut was out (Bahamut would attack any time you used a GCD and oGCD, meaning you would want to cram 8 GCDs into his window, which required some instant casts, so you'd want 4 Ruin 4s ready, as you also dumped a bunch of oGCDs, even Addle and needed the weaving space, because that got you an extra Bahamut attack - I think they later changed it to remove the oGCD part, but the same premise mostly remained), and outside of Bahamut, you had the other 4 to use for instant cast movement tools, as well as the Egi-Assaults themselves, which were movement tools. In practice, ShB SMN had VERY few actual hardcasts in the rotation.

...which is why it always gets me when people say EW SMN is "basically a Ranged Phys instead of a Caster", as if this is new, because it was hyper mobile in ShB as well, making me wonder if those people just didn't play ShB SMN but want to complain about the game being braindead from a place of ignorance anyway...but that's neither here nor there. The important part here is:

Further Ruin.

Just have SCH get a stack of it for each Adlo/Succor (and Physick if you're feeling spicy) that then let them cast Ruin 4, and make Ruin 4's damage 2x a Ruin 3 so that it's "damage neutral". Like WHM, this COULD generate gameplay where you want to have 4 full stacks of Further Ruin going into burst windows (since it would be a damage increase to blow them during burst windows), but people keep saying they want more damage optimization, so that would fit into that model.

.

SGE could already be damage neutral with its GCDs if Toxicon's main target damage was increased to 2x Dosis.

.

One thing I'll warn you is that there are people that will argue that damage neutral GCD heals are bad because...they lower the skill ceiling or something. "No wrong choices/mistakes" is the typical argument. Obviously, the problem with that argument is that they have no solution that makes GCD heal casting NOT suboptimal play. So we keep going through the situation we have with a glut of GCD tools that no one uses because they're "bad".

Yes yes, they can be good in some situations, but those situations are extremely niche. "If it saves you an oGCD use so you can use it at a more optimal time later" or something, but these are very niche scenarios and don't change the fact that they still leave GCD heals feeling "bad" to use across all situations and most of the game, leading to the "glarespam + oGCD weave heal" situation we have today.

.

Oh, wait, no, hit refresh on the page and you already have several people telling you we can't do it. So there ya go.

(Oh, but also note people in general will tell you stuff like Toxicon are bad because you can't use the intended mechanic to generate Addersting. Because doing so outside of untargetable phases is a damage loss. So...double edged sword, I guess? To which end, proposals abound for how to generate Addersting that aren't using GCD heals...which defeats the entire purpose.)