Sage: Media Tour Feedback

[Kissune]

Unfortunately, as long as you can solve "your party not dying" with tools that have no opportunity cost, this whole point and system is moot

Any mechanics that depend on "opportunity" costs will be thrown to the side in favor of tools that have none. And SGE and healers in general have plenty.

Correct, so adding *some* means theres situations where they might come into play. SGE doesnt have a burst heal ability nearly as strong as pneuma. Burst healing is infinitely more valuable than regens in current fight design, and unless that changes, pneuma will always be an extremely potent healing tool on Sage's kit. By making it not neutral, it remains potent, but theres still a notable cost to using it and good sage mains will find a way to optimize it out, rewarding skill expression. Which is in very, very short supply in the healer role.

[Kissune]

This is not how toxikon works. You've got 3 and then have to find windows to get more back. And pneuma is a -capstone- cast gcd with a well defined utility, you don't just use it out of nowhere, there's always a cost attached to it, and that's the long cd on your heal nuke.

Also remember that this is media tour info, there were incorrect potency numbers in previous media tours as well. So numbers might be patched once the expansion drops.

"An opportunity cost is the value of the option not taken when a business makes a decision."

As an example the opportunity cost of using ruin 2 would be the potency difference between broil and ruin 2.

Toxicon having the same potency as dosis means that you are losing nothing by using it, apart from a potential use of it later... which if a fight is mapped out, becomes negligible. With a lower potency, it gains a cost of the difference between dosis and toxicon, meaning one is better to use to optimize damage, but one is better to use for smoother mobility, instead of the latter just being the neutral/better at both. The method by which it is obtained is irrelevant. It's a similar thing of scholar. Every single aetherflow ability comes with the tagline of '-100dps' bc by using an aetherflow heal, you are losing damage. With toxicon, you are losing nothing and gaining mobility.

With pneuma, you are again, losing nothing and gaining a high potency heal. Your dps will never suffer for using or not using pneuma of toxicon. If the only downside is 'it has a cooldown', then... that's not really a downside. That's just a mechanic. Opportunity cost is what makes healing take thought. By forcing you to weigh options, you have to come up with your preferred method of dealing with the situation instead of just throwing the heal tool at it and going back to business as usual.

Toxicon is meant to be an ability that offers you a consolation prize for having to shield, not a reward for shielding at all. Pneuma is meant to be an incredibly powerful burst heal, and as such should come at a cost. Neutral sect is insanely powerful, but has the opportunity cost of being forced to use gcds to proc it. Same with seraphism, deploy, and dissipation. White mage doesn't have much in the way of opportunity cost after the loss of lilies being a dps loss (once that happened WHM should have gone back to a 2.5s gcd at that point).

Maybe I'm just weird, but I don't actually like my healing toolkit being a bunch of fire and forget abilities I do not have to think about ever beyond the first initial consideration of placement. I'm glad sage is getting both opportunity costs (as it stands, I dont expect it to stick to live, and even so not for long), and an interesting dps 'rotation' between the double DoT and psyche.

[Teno]

"An opportunity cost is the value of the option not taken when a business makes a decision."

As an example the opportunity cost of using ruin 2 would be the potency difference between broil and ruin 2.

Toxikon costs one stack, and pneuma is a long cd heal nuke, what is that you don't understand about their opportunity cost ? The only way you're getting toxikon stacks is with botched phase transitions or something like that. It goes back to pressing a gcd heal, plain and simple. And you lose your ability to nuke heal once you press pneuma. And it's certainly, certainly not as you described. The opportunity cost has always been there... And ruin 2 should have followed suit in potency with added mp consumption like it originally was.

AND IF ANYTHING, toxikon should be an ogcd like in pvp. High mp consumption to shield and generate stacks, tweak the numbers a bit for the 2-min window, maybe even give the stack generation an internal cd or whatever. The shield also still needs to break. This is the type of gameplay that's not just fire and forget.

If it's a gain, you'll just use it on cooldown. It won't be the 'apex of Sage's power' itll just be a third stack of phlegma with a cure lmao.

Do you spam the shields on cooldown though ? I don't know what kind of content you play, but if it's anything like what taurus suggested, you won't just fire it off cooldown.

[ty_taurus]

Do you spam the shields on cooldown though ? I don't know what kind of content you play, but if it's anything like what taurus suggested, you won't just fire it off cooldown.

If Pneuma is a DPS gain, then yes it would be used on cooldown because the aim is to maximize its uptime. That said, why I specified replacing the burst heal with a follow-up effect would be that Pneuma itself is the precursor that would give you a resource that you'd have time to use at a more apt moment.

One very simple example would be to divide Pneuma into: Pneuma and Proto-Pneuma:

Pneuma:
Deals unaspected damage to all enemies in a straight line before you with a potency of 720 for the first enemy and 60% less for all remaining enemies.
Additional Effect: Grants Pneumatic for 115 seconds.

Proto-Pneuma:
Deals upaspected damage to all enemies in a straight line before you with a potency of 360 (based on Dosis III's potency at level 92) for the first enemy and 40% less for all remaining enemies.
Addtional Effect: Restores HP to self and all nearby party members.
Cure Potency: 600

^ This example enables you to have a prominent attack to use every 2 minutes (though I'd prefer a shorter cooldown personally), and allows Pneuma's effect to still exist. You do need to cast Pneuma first, but that shouldn't be an issue since it's cast on cooldown anyway. You'll be able to cast Proto-Pneuma for Pneuma's current effect at any point between each cast of Pneuma.

Now, that's not personally what I'd like to see, but it is the most straightforward solution. What I'd rather see is perhaps something like PVP Pneuma, where Pneuma replaces Panhaima as an action. It would look something like this:

Pnuema:
Cooldown: 85 seconds
Deals damage to all enemies in a straight line before you with a potency of 720 for the first enemy and 60% less for all remaining enemies.
Additional Effect: Erects a magic barrier around self and all nearby party members with a potency of 120 for 60 seconds.
Additional Effect: Grants 5 stacks of Pneumatinon to self and all nearby party members for 60 seconds.
Pneumatinon Effect: Consumes a stack to replace the barrier when it is broken. When the effect duration expires, a healing effect is applied..
Cure Potency: 80 per stack.

^ This effect, while it would be cast on cooldown, provides a long duration of small barriers that soften incoming damage for the next minute. The barrier effect is weaker, so how much damage is reduced isn't always going to be significant, but I think can still be interesting. You could then do more interesting things with those stacks rather than just having them sit there passively. For example, maybe you have one action that consumes all stacks to provide a larger barrier to the party that has a lower total potency, but can block a larger amount of damage and another action that consumes 1 stack to cleanse 1 dubuff on all party members with a cleansable debuff. Or perhaps something different.

[ty_taurus]

Pneuma should be a gain, and rather than have upfront healing, it can enable follow-up healing or shielding instead. It's supposed to be the apex of Sage's power, yet all throughout Endwalker it was just a glorified Cure III that had no DPS loss.

[Kissune]

Pneuma should be a gain, and rather than have upfront healing, it can enable follow-up healing or shielding instead. It's supposed to be the apex of Sage's power, yet all throughout Endwalker it was just a glorified Cure III that had no DPS loss.

If it's a gain, you'll just use it on cooldown. It won't be the 'apex of Sage's power' itll just be a third stack of phlegma with a cure lmao.

[ty_taurus]

If it's a gain, you'll just use it on cooldown. It won't be the 'apex of Sage's power' itll just be a third stack of phlegma with a cure lmao.

So the apex of their power should be a button you don't even use in most content because it's far more excessive than what you actually need and isn't attached to Addersgall which you need to spend anyway to get MP back before you start exploring other options to heal with? I would rather have a large burst cooldown that I use consistently in my gameplay than "Cure III laser"

PVP does it perfectly. Not only is it your most powerful source of damage, but it provides a lot of protection for your party when you engage in a fight. In PVE, timing of healing is far more important, which is why its hard to attach healing to DPS gains. But there is a midpoint that we could achieve where both the damage and the sustain granted could feel worthwhile.

[ty_taurus]

I added my own feedback of Sage over on General in a more in-depth anaylsis. Please take a look here.

[kosmos_heals]

Thanks for posting this, and yup, this just seems like they forgot about it. Just hoping they fix before release/savage and not in .3/.4 like they have done with other changes/buffs.

[AnotherPerson]

I think what frustrates me the most is that these changes to sage are slowly moving in the right direction to be a healer that DPS to heal, but then they buff tanks and DPS sustain so much after that it feels like healers as a whole are taking many steps backwards to their gameplay.

A lot of the healing skills become pointless and redundant because the party simply no longer needs it. These changes on party sustain/survival from non-healer roles forces healers on doing more Glare/Broil/Dosis/Malefic and just healing raidwides rather than prioritizing on unique skills and ways to dedicate saving the party. Tt becomes so monotonous and none of the new additions is enough to offset the monotony because a lot of those healing skills is just more healing that already been made redundant in a previous expansion. If the Dawntrail changes on Sage were made in Endwalker, I can say Endwalker gotten better compared to Shadowbringers (which also equally had a lot of monotony from strong tank sustain, but it somewhat balances it out better with more DPS tools). However, with the addition of increased sustain on all roles in Dawntrail with 'no change in difficulty', I cannot see how healers will feel better to play with so much of their actions just being unnecessary in the face of other roles contributing to the party sustain. Healers as a whole is just being pushed off from the trinity and powercrept by other roles. Part of the reason is because combat is not hitting frequently enough to warrant the need for those healing tools, thus constantly reducing the difficulty of the content. ILVL Sync after patches does not help this in any way. It just makes things worse because of how high ILVL sync is.

I could provide a lot of feedback to make Sage feel more coherent in its identity as a healer that DPS to heal while offering shield-healing playstyle to differentiate it from SCH --
1. Like saying Eudaimonia is affected by Soteria
2. Taurochole no longer provides mitigation or become a 700 potency heal, instead significantly raises max HP to the target (30%) for 8s and applies Eudaimonia on application for 12s
3. Kerachole no longer provides regen but turns into 25% mitigation that falls off overtime, returning to 10% with 1 stack remaining (5 stacks, losing 1 stack per 3s, 3% mitigation per stack)
4. Philosophia grants Eudiamonia to all allied targets in range and applies a stacking barrier to targets affected by Eudaimonia after each magic attack.
5. Toxikon triggers 2-3 activations of Kardion and Eudaimonia
6. Rhizomata doesn't have a lowered cooldown but gains an additional buff to use an addersgall action without being affected by its cooldown (Ninja's Kassatsu-type of skill), thereby 'augmenting' Addersgall skills as well
7. Pepsis no longer breaks shields, but turns Kardion and Eudaimonia healing into shields

But none of this matters if there's no damage to heal...

Just to reiterate. Again, Psyche and Eukrasian Dykrasia are great additions to the toolkit, but it just isn't enough. They neither interact with healing in any substantial way nor provide enough impact to blunt the Dosis spam alone when more and more of the healing toolkit just no longer matters. Making meaningful decisions as a healer and saving players is what makes me enjoy healer. Without it, all that's left is just maintaining DPS. For a healer that DPS to heal, having more DPS buttons feels good since that's a secondary source of engagement, but ultimately that enjoyment is still limited because the primary source of engagement simply does not exist in a meaningful capacity to make save players as a healer. None of the new healing skills work on 'saving' players due to the way it's designed, and a lot of the old skills also fail to do this. It just feels like glorified healing that does not improve what our current toolkit can already do.

AoE Kardia is a great concept. A lot of people have been asking for it because it supports the healer gameplay identity that many people asked for. But what good is that skill if it's just a very weak heal over time with no way to support its function, and on a super long cooldown of 180 seconds? In a precarious situation, it doesn't do anything to rapidly increase your party's HP. Compared to long duration healing over time, we have better alternatives like Physis II, and on a much lower cooldown. Instead of providing ways to support this skill concept, it feels neglected as a whole in the toolkit. That's my main gripe with the way Sage is designed in Dawntrail. The identity is there, but the gameplay execution to support the identity is still disjointed and lacking.