One of the greatest reasons to use Dissipate is now a Moot Point.

Once upon a time I was joking when I said that nobody who develops this game mains a healer. Now I'm confident that none of them even play one. Shadowbringers adjustments to healers were done so they could fully automate healing via a script for testing fights. They unironically believe that spamming Cure/Physick/Benefic is what makes healer mains enjoy their role, and will gladly collapse any concept of a skill ceiling to deliver it.

Man I can't wait for 6.0. They don't listen to experienced healers -at all-. Please look forward to 5 more healing spells that do exactly the same thing as existing heals, healer damage spells completely removed with a solo duty auto-skip just for healers, and a new DPS class with an AOE benediction casually tossed into their utility belt.

Silly me for being hopeful that SE would address the healing issues SCH has, like with the faerie and what to spend that damned gauge on. But instead we got an adjustment to our dps, huh? I personally don't mind the ED "change" but can I get it back at a lower level again then. Why even make this change so late in the expansion anyway. Why not just save it for the next expansion. Oh well maybe 5.5 will see som healing changes... HAHAHAHA!

They nerfed the cost of Aetherflow heals - so Energy Drain doesn't have as much impact on DPS. While this is undoubtedly a "buff" for Scholar in terms of progressing a fight as total DPS has been moved over to Biolysis, it also highlights a lot more problems and punishes Scholars for moving more than before if you're trying to optimize when playing scholar well.

With the Energy Drain nerf from 150 potency to 100 potency, Dissipation has also been indirectly nerfed and highlighted a bigger problem in the scholar toolkit when trying to improve as a healer. Even before, Dissipation is generally not worth using for unplanned Aetherflow healing as it doesn't let you use any of your other Faerie skills {thereby messing up your healing cooldowns by delaying a vast majority of them} and prevents Faerie from passively healing with Embrace (because you basically lose out on roughly 960-1050 potency worth of Embrace), so Dissipation was mostly used for 3 Energy Drains for an extra 450 potency when scholars know they don't need to heal for 30 seconds. Using Ruin II + Energy Drain would've given 350 potency in total per aetherflow. That's a 70 potency gain per Ruin II because Broil III was 280 potency, making Dissipation give an extra 210 potency compared to just using Broil III. You get a bit more if you swiftcast a Broil III + Energy Drain (150 potency gain), for a total of 290 potency over just Broil III spam.

Now, the combination between Ruin II + Energy Drain (200 + 100 potency) now gives only 10 extra potency compared to just using Broil III (which is now a 290 potency skill). On its own, Dissipation is now worth around 300 potency worth of DPS. Since Dissipation requires one use of Ruin II to weave in, Dissipation by itself totals up to a 30 potency gain over Broil III since you have to use at least 1 Ruin II per Energy Drain, or a 120 potency gain if you use Swiftcast for a Broil III.
Ruin II by itself is now a 90 potency loss every time you have to heal.

Because certain Faerie skills cannot be weaved together in the Scholar toolkit (such as using Whispering Dawn/Fey Union/Fey Blessing/Fey Illumination cannot be used with Dissipation/Summon Seraph), trying to use multiple Faerie skills at once will also be more penalizing since scholars must use Ruin II multiple times to use different healing skills or access different skills, which makes scholars feel the clunkyness more when forced to use multiple Ruin IIs when the skills couldn't be weaved together in on GCD. This also means a slightly bigger DPS loss every time you have to heal. Again, compared to the previous Scholar, it's technically a buff since you would be doing more damage per Broil III and Biolysis has been buffed by 10 potency per tick to make up for the Energy Drain nerf, but if you're trying to optimize with the new Scholar, it also means you should avoid excessive healing with oGCDs as much as possible since each GCD used for Ruin II now has an extra 10 potency cost in addition to its 80 potency cost from before.

As Ruin II should only be used when they have to heal with oGCD skills, it also means movement as a Scholar is going to be more expensive than before if you have to move using Ruin II. In this regard, White Mages have it easier at the highest level for optimization because they can save movement using Afflatus Solace/Afflatus Rapture and have it pay back with Afflatus Misery, resulting in less DPS loss.

White Mages using 3 Lilies + 1 Misery = 4 GCDs and 900 potency, which results in a 300 potency loss compared to using 4 Glare.
Scholars using Ruin II 4 times = 4 GCDs and 800 potency, which results in a 360 potency loss compared to using 4 Broil III.
Ruin II doesn't heal HP either.

Scholars straight up lose DPS with every Ruin II they use unless one of the Ruin IIs have Energy Drain in them, resulting in a 10 potency gain over Broil III (making Ruin II an actual free weave slot). While scholars don't clip as much as White Mages, scholars definitely get hurt more by simply weaving because their toolkit prevents weaving certain skills in the same GCD together.

The buff to Broil III also indirectly makes GCD Healing more expensive. Every GCD used for Succor or Adloquium means scholars lose 290 potency. It also means Deployment Tactics also now have an additional 10 potency cost attached to it if you choose to use Adloquium and clip the skill for a total of 290 potency, or use Ruin II (now 90 potency loss) to weave in Deployment Tactics for a total of 380 potency loss.

All in all, it's a buff to DPS, a heavy nerf to certain skills, lowered the skill floor, kept the clunkyness of the job, but slightly made the clunky feel worse with the higher opportunity cost of using Ruin II over Broil III.

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Originally Posted by Brandedblade

It's frustrating to me because I fundamentally agree with the logic of the devs on this, we're just in a bad spot of class vs fight design that makes it muddled in practice. I personally hate the fact that we have this powerful and flexible selection of heals we're actively punished for using but I understand the fact that with the way fights work it's inevitable we'll need to dump the stacks on something due to fight downtime.

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I agree with this. Whilst I think the best solution is to give us more to do in our downtime for reasons we've discussed before, I don't object to this logic either because ultimately, I just want to enjoy playing my role again.

I feel the problem in their approach in implementing this philosophy is as follows:
- They believe by creating less of a DPS incentive they increase our healing incentive. This is evident from their changes in 5.0 and their comments here.
- But it should be that they create less of a DPS incentive BY increasing our healing incentive and that simply boils down to content or the efficiency of our healing abilities.

The content needs to make us make better use of our kit as you say or our healing abilities need to be more appropriate for the content.

If it's too easy to just let HP drop and then apply an oGCD and go back to DPSing, then regardless of what they change about DPS abilities won't impact my engagement with healing. It will just change my engagement with DPS, which honestly is already very lackluster.

I also know there's the complaint that there's too many healers who get tunnel visioned into DPSing, that's not an issue with job design, but unavoidable in a game where your performance is measured in rDPS. And arguably is worsened when there's 60 or 70% downtime where all you can do is spam DPS.

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Originally Posted by AnotherPerson

optimize when playing scholar well.

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What is this "optimize" word you speak of. That's a DPS activity. Healer activities are glamour, overhealing, and dance emotes. Stop trying to break the trinity.

I thought scholar was gonna get a buff, not a stealth nerf to all pre-shadowbringers content. I expected a change on the level on bard (10 potency to a single skill)
In other words, I expected a cosmetic change at best for a job I didn't play past 50 for years and I'm still /dissapointed

They also said that bard won't get its songs backs because they would be too strong. /facepalm

It took 6 years to get monk into a decent state again. What's this state? Why its pretty much close to ARR's monk but with internal release baked in and greased lightning stacks gone at long last

So if they can do that for monk in the middle of an expansion, why can't they fix healers? Is it by any chance because they don't want to?


We need new members in the devs job design team as a priority, ones that care about fun, lore and uniqueness to incentivise skillful play rather than mindless heal spam, "Optimising" for the hardcore raiders that bully and ensuring the "you don't pay my sub!" imbeciles that should be booted back to the hall of the novice to drag everything down
I should not be dreading 6.0 killing off any chance of me wanting to pick up a healer again.

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Originally Posted by YoshiP

The dev team wants you to use Aetherflow more on healing.

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This will never happen without a fundamental change to the battle system or dungeon/boss designs. Spend more on healing? Healing who, when? If we needed to be using aetherflow heals more we already would be. The reason we use Energy Drain at all is because we're often sitting there with nothing better to spend Aetherflow on. You guys caused this, not us.

I remember today after a sleeping too wake up and reading the patch notes too see what Sch would get for buffs. (Astro/whm player so I whas hoping for my static co healer to get some good buffs) and what did I see made me wheeze for around 2 hours on my work just because after the patch notes came the liveletter and the little note on why they did that change made it 100 times better.
Like shb is the healer train wreck of ff 14

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Originally Posted by Mortex

Like shb is the healer train wreck of ff 14

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Let's be honest, the train wreck was 4.0 lilies. It's just only gotten worse from there.

Glad to see im not the only one who seen this change and was like WTF.