Because why not: A Moderate Proposal - SCH

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

As for Energy Drain, IMO I think the ability is beyond cursed at this point. A measly 100 potency 'nuke' shouldn't even be mentioned in the same breath as abilities as powerful as Soil and Indom, yet here we are.

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Before the adjustment to Misery's potency (900 + aoe) , WHM didn't want to interact with its lillies because it lost 340 potency a minute in exchange for instant MP free healing.

300 potency a minute for 3 energy drains a minute (more if you include dissipation in burst windows) in exchange for Soil or Indom is definitely not as flagrant (Or maybe it is, I don't know anymore), but its still a DPS loss to use, especially when SCH has AF free abilities: Seraph, Whispering Dawn, Fey llumination, Protraction, Fey Blessing, and Recitation.

ED is a tactical choice of course. On the dwindling rare occassions where Soil would
save your co-healer a GCD heal, its probably better to use AF for healing. It gives SCH a certain tactical flair, but its in this weird spot where its potency isn't that significant to feel wasteful, yet its still remains as a potency loss over other more efficient options.

I personally would remove its damage and simply make it give back MP as a call back to the Syphon spell from classic FF. It would still retain its AF dump use, it would just not conflict with Dissipation anymore and AF usage to heal.

It would also make SCH less clunky, but definitely more boring to play.

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Originally Posted by Osmond

They might just remove Energy Drain altogether. It's becoming more useless to have in SCH's toolkit....more like done on purpose, but whatever. Just get rid of it and create a new ability.

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Meanwhile I used Energy Drain 31 times in my first DSR clear and well over 40+ in subsequent reclears, so no clue where you're getting the idea that Energy Drain is "becoming more useless". "I don't like pressing Energy Drain" =/= "Energy Drain is useless"

Ruin II replaced with Miasma: Very nice

Physic upgrades to Adlo: I agree enough that I've also suggested this

Lustrate upgrades into Excogitation, Excogitation CD removed: I agree enough that I've also suggested this

Dissipation: Good start, there's plenty of other stuff that I'd look at. Like that 3min CD, dividing everything by 3 was a potential idea iirc (so, 60s CD, 10s duration, generate 1 aetherflow), it's not often we need 30 whole seconds of buffing our 'spell based healing' specifically, but a quick 10s boost for a couple of well placed shields could get a lot more uses found I think

Aetherpact: Interesting, and solves the 'Excog cannot top someone who's between 51% and 100% HP' issue. Rather than being 10 gauge, I assume it'd function better if it were stronger/costed 20 so it feels chunkier, maybe like 500p/25 gauge?

Energy Drain decoupled from Aetehrflow: Possibly interesting way to make it feel less bad to have to use a Soil, but it introduces the classic issue of 'what if I don't need the healing, what do I spend aetherflow on'. Personally I'm not too stressed about overcapping and just using AF CD when I still have 'more than zero' flows left but others are not me

Whispering Dawn upgrades to Fey Blessing: We're trying to make SCH and SGE feel more different, not more similar. This is just Physis 2... 2. Blessing's issue I think is that it doesn't cost gauge anymore. Giving it a gauge cost again would allow for the relative strength of the skill to be increased to feel good to use again

Broil IV now spreads DoTs from its target to enemy targets within 5y: indifferent

All in all, pretty agreeable

edit: an idea, one which will not be received well: Energy drain is changed from 'deals X potency damage' to 'Requires Bio or Miasma to be on the target. Reduces the remaining duration of one of those effects, chosen at random, by 3 seconds, and deals damage equal to the potency of the damage over time that was consumed'. Or some such wording. Basically, put DOTs up, get more EDs. Use EDs, speed DOT ticks up. Potentially the game chooses the same one multiple times compared to the other, now you have to refresh Miasma while Bio is at 6 seconds instead of the expected 12. It's less punishing to 'not use ED' in this case because it's not losing 100p, but instead 'one DOT tick' which is, what, 70 for Bio nowadays?

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Originally Posted by Nizzi

Meanwhile I used Energy Drain 31 times in my first DSR clear and well over 40+ in subsequent reclears, so no clue where you're getting the idea that Energy Drain is "becoming more useless". "I don't like pressing Energy Drain" =/= "Energy Drain is useless"

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Do you expect me to know what you do in DSR clear? Yes, i'll stand by what I said that Energy Drain to be removed and replaced with a new ability because it's USELESS.

Keep aetherflow’s 20% mp thing and add 5% to a 150-250 potency energy drain. Enough to bail you out if your whole party’s colossally misstepped but under normal conditions you’d be fine with lucid + aetherflow on cool-down. Also remove party buffs from all non-healers except maybe physical ranged.

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Originally Posted by Osmond

Do you expect me to know what you do in DSR clear? Yes, i'll stand by what I said that Energy Drain to be removed and replaced with a new ability because it's USELESS.

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The problem is that it isn't 'USELESS' by any stretch. DPS will almost always carry value no matter what. Outside of broken old Extremes like Ifrit, Mog and Levi, piling on more damage is almost never a bad thing whereas piling on more healing offers nothing. Just straight up removing it is a bad call IMO as it removes any real encouragement for inexperienced players to keep Aetherflow on cooldown. But nerfing it even further isn't going to change much of anything as long as powerful heals like Indom and Soil aren't needed in mainstream gameplay. Changing the damage potency to an MP draining affect is about as good a suggestion as is possible given the circumstances. I just can't think of anything else that isn't either going to be genuinely worthless or fail to fix the current problem.

It's why Ren decoupled Energy Drain from Aetherflow and made it compete with Aetherpact as the new Lustrate so to speak. It allows us to use the major cooldowns Sacred Soil and Excogitation without losing DPS to it. Well, "cooldown" with the new Excog. Energy Drain will probably still win out in most situations against the new Aetherpact since it comes down to a tank buster potentially killing a tank at 51% HP or not. In Lapis Manalis 4 man Experts? Not likely with our geared tanks, nah. In Savage, maybe depending on the invuln use potentially bringing it to no again. The co-healer will probably be a WHM or AST using spells like the lily heals, Bene, Tetra, Essential Dignity, Lady Card or Earthly Star to counter heal some stuff with your Excog there too.

Roe also threw in a suggestion to make Energy Drain potentially alter the rotation further by making the DoTs tick faster. This in turn could further reduce 1 or 2 Broil casts per minute for 1 - 2 DoT casts. I think it might need to consume at least 6 seconds. This makes the damage to be around 140 if it chooses Biolysis to 60 for Miasma. That way the damage kind of levels out close to a 100 average that it does now. I can imagine there to be some approval since we are attempting to reduce more Broil casts.

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Originally Posted by fulminating

Keep aetherflow’s 20% mp thing and add 5% to a 150-250 potency energy drain. Enough to bail you out if your whole party’s colossally misstepped but under normal conditions you’d be fine with lucid + aetherflow on cool-down. Also remove party buffs from all non-healers except maybe physical ranged.

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Hm.

5% of 10,000 MP = 500 MP, or enough to cast a single Physic. Not sure how that's sufficient to bail anyone out. Especially since, instead of spending that AF on an Energy Drain, you could have spent it on an Indom, Soil, Excog, or Lustrate (under the current system). Or do you mean add the 5% under this new system?

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Originally Posted by Osmond

Do you expect me to know what you do in DSR clear? Yes, i'll stand by what I said that Energy Drain to be removed and replaced with a new ability because it's USELESS.

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

The problem is that it isn't 'USELESS'...

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I think the big problem with ED is what Sebazy said before, that it's a pathetically small amount, yet commands this huge discussion. While damage >>> all is a concept, the ED conundrum is on that proves how bad the paradigm is. That people will sacrifice big heals and even mitigation - mitigation is never NOT useful, either, unless absolutely zero damage is going out, which is almost never (Ex5 aside) - for a paltry 100 Potency of damage, which is something like 0.000001% of the average modern Savage boss's health bar, meaning you clear the fight faster on the order of fractions of a second by using it. Even if you add up all the ED uses over a 10-20 min fight, you're probably finishing the fight no more than a few seconds faster with 100% ED use/uptime.

It's so paltry it's useless in all practical senses, yet because it is damage and because players are often running under the paradigm of damage >>> all, it seems relevant when its relevance is severely overblown.

On the level 80 striking dummies outside of Yedlihmad, my Energy Drain does 3k and some change damage, 5k on a crit. For comparison, Ruin 2 does ~7.5k, 11k on a crit, and Broil IV does 9.5k, 15.5k on a crit. While I'm not 100% CERTAIN I'm doing this right, looking at the top P5S kill right now (the entry boss for this raid set), the party's damage seems to be 29.84 million, or 29,840k over 6:30 of fighting. Given using Dissipation on the pull and twice more (3 total uses) and an AF use on the pull and every minute mark thereafter (6 uses), that's a total of 9 x3 = 27 total AF stacks. Assuming ALL of those were used on Energy Drains, that would be 27 EDs. Even assuming they were ALL crits, that would be 5k x 27 = 135k. Multiplying that by 1.5x - which is generous - assuming perfect buff alignment and a bit of a buffer (average party buffs are 30-40% more damage, not 50%) brings us to 202.5k.

202.5 / 29,840 *100% = 0.67%

6 x60 + 30 = 390 seconds for the full fight.

390 * 0.0067 = 2.613.

In other words, using ALL Aetherflows on Energy Drains, with optimal buff alignment, and even a big of an extra buffer assuming food buffs and better gear than mine (I'm in the full 630 augmented gearset with the Amazing Mando weapon, Crit in all slots that allow it, though I do tend to use Det as much as DHit, so I'm giving that extra buffer to account for that), me using absolute full uptime would shave off less than 3 seconds from the fight.

Granted, me and any group I was in would probably be a bit slower and have a kill time closer to 9 mins, but even so, we're talking shaving off maybe 10 seconds. Note that the longer the fight, the more seconds it could save, but this has caveats. For example, in an Ultimate, sometimes you want to slow DPS for various reasons related to transitions and buff alignments and mechanics and so on, meaning you CAN'T (or maybe don't want to) always use all those Energy Drains in the first place.

NOW, that's not IRrelevant - I've absolutely seen 0.2% Enrages where a 10 second faster fight MIGHT have resulted in a clear - but that's assuming ALL Aetherflow go into Energy Drains. If you're that close to an Enrage, it's probably because some of your DPS died or otherwise did stupid things, and those AF might better have been spent on Soil or Excog during the fight itself. Your DPSers will ALWAYS do more DPS per second than an Energy Drain as long as they're pushing literally ANY attack button on their keyboard. For comparison, my 605 ilevel NIN AUTOATTACKS do around 2k damage, and spamming just Spinning Edge over and over does 5.7k with 7.7k crits. THROWING DAGGER does comparable damage to Energy Drain. My GNB at 625 spamming Keen Edge does around 3.5k (+1.7k autos), and even just spamming Lightning Shot does 3k (4.9k crits). So trading those Energy Drains for a Soil or Excog that keeps a DPSer or Tank alive and they have a dipping bird on their 1 key, that's ALREADY doing more damage than Energy Drain itself is. That's how little damage Energy Drain actually does.

For all the talk that Energy Drain gets, it's crazy to think it's over what will realistically be a difference of a handful of seconds. Again, not always irrelevant, but outside of "by the skin of your teeth close call" clears, it's effectively irrelevant. Sometimes, it absolutely IS the difference between a clear and an enrage, but it's crazy how small the amount actually is when you look at it in percent terms and compared to other Jobs basic spamable abilities or the overall time of the boss fight. This is 27 uses, but even for Nizzi's 40+, we're probably still not talking more than 10 seconds shaved off the fight in absolute terms.

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Originally Posted by Tigore

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Basically, yeah. ED competing with Aetherpact here means you still have an opportunity cost and optimization/trade-offs to consider, but it's not as punitive and, in particular, isn't blocking you out of cool spells. There's no point in having spells that are thematically and mechanically cool if players feel like they are bad/suboptimal using them. Having the cost-benefit of ED vs Ap preserves some of that dynamism while still allowing players to interact with these cool parts of their kit that they often feel like they can't or shouldn't use.

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

Ruin II replaced with Miasma: Very nice

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Thank you! Glad you like it. Again, I like this version because it can be spammed for movement without a HUGE loss (and only slightly more loss than now with Ruin 2's Potency) due to the up front damage, but it also allows optimization by not overwriting it unnecessarily and by keeping good uptime.

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

Physic upgrades to Adlo: I agree enough that I've also suggested this

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Mhm. I think across all the Healers other than SGE (specifically because of Eukrasia), it just makes sense at this point, and I've noticed we agree on this frequently.

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

Lustrate upgrades into Excogitation, Excogitation CD removed: I agree enough that I've also suggested this

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Oh yeah? Nice. More agreement! \o/

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

Dissipation: Good start, there's plenty of other stuff that I'd look at. Like that 3min CD, dividing everything by 3 was a potential idea iirc (so, 60s CD, 10s duration, generate 1 aetherflow), it's not often we need 30 whole seconds of buffing our 'spell based healing' specifically, but a quick 10s boost for a couple of well placed shields could get a lot more uses found I think

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Yeah, as I said to Sebazy, I'm more here just making a minor change to make it not ANTI-synergistic with the rest of our kit AND our class fantasy. I'm okay with some future changes from there, I just want it to not suck/feel bad to use.

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

Aetherpact: Interesting, and solves the 'Excog cannot top someone who's between 51% and 100% HP' issue. Rather than being 10 gauge, I assume it'd function better if it were stronger/costed 20 so it feels chunkier, maybe like 500p/25 gauge?

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That could absolutely work. The potency on it was me just saying "What would make it no more powerful than Aetherpact is right now?", but a higher cost to make up for the potency could absolutely be fine by me.

The other nice thing about the AP change is that it means you're actively interacting with your Faerie/commanding her abilities more frequently in a potentially meaningful way. Well, when you aren't dumping it all into Energy Drain, but that's still something vs the once per min or so AOE you have her use and otherwise leave her to her own devices.

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

Energy Drain decoupled from Aetehrflow: Possibly interesting way to make it feel less bad to have to use a Soil, but it introduces the classic issue of 'what if I don't need the healing, what do I spend aetherflow on'. Personally I'm not too stressed about overcapping and just using AF CD when I still have 'more than zero' flows left but others are not me

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As I say, that's what removing Excogitation's CD does. While it IS possible using an Excog on someone could result in wasted healing, in general, that's unlikely. 2 Soils + 1 Excog or Indom per minute uses all three already. And even using Dissipation would make it 2 Soils, 1 Indom, 3 Excogs. An Excog on the Tank will always do SOMEthing useful unless you're constantly 100% topping them up yourself, and in 8 man fights, you have a second Tank or DPS standing in bad or could just throw the extras on you and your co-healer for some added insurance. While it could go wasted from time to time, extra Excogs are generally not ever going to be BAD.

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

Whispering Dawn upgrades to Fey Blessing: We're trying to make SCH and SGE feel more different, not more similar. This is just Physis 2... 2. Blessing's issue I think is that it doesn't cost gauge anymore. Giving it a gauge cost again would allow for the relative strength of the skill to be increased to feel good to use again

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Well, this PARTICULAR idea isn't trying to make SCH and SGE feel different (I'm completely ignoring SGE for this, honestly, as the idea was we'd do this for SCH alongside changes to WHM/AST/SGE that you guys want to do, so SGE should be a Chloromancer after this and feel different anyway). But even that aside, considering the rest of the kit's changes here, I don't think SCH will feel much like SGE even if we didn't change SGE at all. We could give Blessing its gauge cost again (and remove the CD), but keep in mind that part of this change was to address button bloat some, which having it as a separate button doesn't do. And as I said, an alternative would be combining it with Illumination instead. But honestly, to me, Whispering Dawn always FEELS a bit weak because it's only a HoT. If it had that bump of heal at the front, it would feel a bit better. Top the party off before incoming damage then have the HoT to get them back up after it. Though I suppose we COULD always put the healing burst on the back end. That would be different, but might result in more overhealing and be less useful.

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

Broil IV now spreads DoTs from its target to enemy targets within 5y: indifferent

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I thought you'd be happier about Bane IV, but Indifferent is good enough. :D I thought about PvP Deployment Tactics, and that IS an option but then we'd need Deploy's CD to be 30 sec or less, and being an oGCD, it wouldn't disrupt the Art of War spam nearly as much as cycling in a Broil (imagine that - Broil being used to BREAK UP the nuke spam, ironic...) and the shorter CD might make it too powerful in single target fights where you'd be exclusively using all those extra Deploys on Adlos.

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

All in all, pretty agreeable

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Thanks!

Honestly, I thought you all would just really hate this idea, so...kind of pleasantly surprised. \o/

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

edit: an idea, one which will not be received well: Energy drain is changed from 'deals X potency damage' to 'Requires Bio or Miasma to be on the target. Reduces the remaining duration of one of those effects, chosen at random, by 3 seconds, and deals damage equal to the potency of the damage over time that was consumed'. Or some such wording. Basically, put DOTs up, get more EDs. Use EDs, speed DOT ticks up. Potentially the game chooses the same one multiple times compared to the other, now you have to refresh Miasma while Bio is at 6 seconds instead of the expected 12. It's less punishing to 'not use ED' in this case because it's not losing 100p, but instead 'one DOT tick' which is, what, 70 for Bio nowadays?

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Hm...miiiiigt be a bit much. One thing I've generally been opposed to with healer kits is randomness. This isn't even a FFXIV thing. I always preferred straight spell power to crit back in WoW because I found crit heals often unreliable vs just straight up, consistently reliable ones (exception for Holydin in Cata, but that was specifically because of the way their MP recovery worked with that 70% MP refund on crit thing, which is what made Holy Light spam possible...and you stacked enough crit that crits were semi-guaranteed at that point anyway...). In DPS, I'm a bit more lenient because the whole point of DPS is that you aren't focused on anything but the fight mechanics and your rotation. Tanking and especially Healing have other things occupying your time, so watching for a proc or something small to light up on your bar is a riskier proposition.

The problem with this idea, in particular, is it'd be really easy to miss because, as we've discussed before, the native UI is pretty bad about telling you info about your DoTs on the target, so it would often be really easy for people to miss one going down by 3 seconds. Though you're right about the damage being even more paltry than a lost ED.

The one other issue with this, though, is that it randomly picking which DoT to use might lead to weird optimizations. Like what if you only want Biolysis up to ensure the greater damage? Sure, you want Miasma up for the extra Faerie Gauge, but this might lead to just waiting for Miasma to drop momentarily, spamming out Energy Drains, then refreshing it, etc. Which isn't NECESSARILY a bad thing, but my goal in general is to make things more intuitive and that's a little...wonky, I guess? Or POTENTIALLY wonky...

The one concern I have with this build already is that it has a lot of oGCDs. But maybe that won't be too much of an issue since they're still not super COMPLICATED, just your standard heals and then Energy Drain - contrast AST's oGCDs, which involve all the card juggling and target swapping and all that craziness in addition to the heals... - so I think it would be manageable for most people. Maybe?

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Originally Posted by Renathras

{Energy Drain Stuff}

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I don't think how little damage Energy Drain does is the pivotal point with it. I believe the other side of that coin is what happens when you *don't* have something like it. What happens in the (reasonably frequent, especially in easier content) scenario where you have say 2 Aetherflow charges, Aetherflow is 5 seconds away from refreshing. You want to use Aetherflow on cooldown- doing otherwise is wasting stacks. You don't want to use Aetherflow while sitting on stacks, since that's also wasting stacks. You have no Energy Drain. So you...Sacred Soil? Throw a Lustrate on the tank for the heck of it?

Banking the damage in the fairy gauge like you suggest doesn't quiiiiiite cover the issue with useless overhealing (lilies have the same problem), but it at least does a better job storing the optimization potential than the current setup.

It could probably be 10%, I was on the fence about it eclipsing aetherflow. I think it's important to have a way to dump aetherflow productively because encouraging overcapping is at odds with the design for all the other jobs - you don't want to overcap mp on drk, you don't want to overcap beast gauge on war or cartridges or samurai stickers or whatever.

I think your maths is off. I'll go and test it myself, but from looking at a couple of parses it seems that energy drain's closer to 3-4% contribution even without exclusive use on ED. According to some calculations on the yedlihlad beach, energy drain is about 4.8% of my damage if I burn all aetherflow + dissipations on it and use it under chain. Energy drain doing 3149-6494 (3426 median), which was about 267dps/5525dps or 4.8..%. I did forget to use dissipation toward the end, so should probably have had marginally more.
Sorry for the delay, took ages to add up all those numbers from the flying text