Incremental Steps Towards Something New: What Should Be Gradually Prototyped?

[Connor]

Using content like ‘Eureka 7.0 version’ or ‘Criterion dungeon #100’ would be the best bet for these kinds of experimentations, I think. Maybe having them attempt to give players an even wider scope and selection of ‘additional abilities’ (or w/e they call them this time lol) could give them an opportunity to try out giving players more varied and interesting support/non-dps spells and abilities.

I think it’d be cool if they tried gradually moving party support from being entirely passive and fixed to something that’s actively managed by the player and not the 120-sec timer. I mean, they could ofc keep certain ‘big raid buffs’ on the 120-sec timer so it’s not a complete mega change.
Like if healers stole ‘Protect’ and ‘Bravery’ from Bozja and put it in their role skills if it worked lol. Then they could gradually extend that to additional support abilities like Warden’s Paean, Curing Waltz, Lux Solaris, etc. Maybe they could even bring back things like MP restoration skills.
I mean, none of those skills outside of Bravery even have any effect on dps, so it probably wouldn’t be too game/breaking, especially if they developed it gradually.

Additionally if they were going to incremental gameplay changes then making minor adjustments to healer oGCD/GCD balance could make healer gcds actually worth using outside of like day 1 ultimates (exaggerating, a little lol). Making small adjustments over time to rebalance how much they use gcds would mean they could make it more equal without having to ‘pull the rug out’ from under new players and causing them all to destroy the world or w/e lol. But then, it’s a bit more difficult for that kind of things to be ‘played around with’ when developing content (I’d imagine) too, so it’s harder to say like ‘maybe they could use X content for this’.

That said, there’s also extremely little in the way of ‘healer content’ in and of itself. Like when Estinian showed up and done a shield in Dragon’s Aery and you had to keep him alive during it. It’d be nice if general content could have ‘things that are meant for the healer to handle’, and not just ‘die and let tank solo’ lol