Question concerning you Art of War opinions

More specifically if your opinion on it would change depending on if they bring anything back from old scholar. Would you all have accepted Art of War becoming a part of Scholar’s kit if you didn’t lose your DoT’s cause of it? For example, starting a pull with Miasma>Bio>Bane, place a Shadow Flare, run in for Miasma 2, then use Art of War in between healing. Cause it feels like to me that it would have complemented the DoT stuff and the spell gets a lot of flak cause it came in the same time we lost all of that.

I'd like them to change AOW to a PBAOE DOT skill instead. Make a DOT tick on every mob affected. An AOE nuke is what every other healer has already. Or tuck a Pacify on, or a Silence, or convert it into some sort of Bad Breath.

It would have been a good compliment, or even it could have upgraded to shadow flare

Another alternative would be it does more damage per dot on an enemy, to encourage dotting correctly

Scholars would use blizzard 2 as their aoe spam in ARR after they laid their dots, cross classed from thurmaturge.

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Originally Posted by Vinal211

More specifically if your opinion on it would change depending on if they bring anything back from old scholar. Would you all have accepted Art of War becoming a part of Scholar’s kit if you didn’t lose your DoT’s cause of it? For example, starting a pull with Miasma>Bio>Bane, place a Shadow Flare, run in for Miasma 2, then use Art of War in between healing. Cause it feels like to me that it would have complemented the DoT stuff and the spell gets a lot of flak cause it came in the same time we lost all of that.

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I would rather have had Miasma + Bio and Bane with Art of War being the filler spell instead of Miasma 2 myself. I've expressed it before but I'm honestly not a fan of Miasma II. It always felt weak prior to Stormblood and after stormblood it felt more like a poorly implemented skill that made another skill (Ruin II) redundant.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vinal211

More specifically if your opinion on it would change depending on if they bring anything back from old scholar. Would you all have accepted Art of War becoming a part of Scholar’s kit if you didn’t lose your DoT’s cause of it? For example, starting a pull with Miasma>Bio>Bane, place a Shadow Flare, run in for Miasma 2, then use Art of War in between healing. Cause it feels like to me that it would have complemented the DoT stuff and the spell gets a lot of flak cause it came in the same time we lost all of that.

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I personally don't miss shadow flare and always felt it was clunky. AoW as a replacement to SF while keeping the rest of the old kit (Bane, Bio + Miasma) would be peak SCH to me personally. Especially combined with how smooth the faerie actions are now

Art of War feels like an incomplete AoE rotation after everything Scholar used to bring to the table. I know we'll probably never go back to the busy Heavenward days but at the very least it needs a secondary effect like maybe increasing the duration of Biolysis on any target under the effect by 5 seconds. Having both Miasma 2 and Shadow Flare would be ideal to me. One AoE DoT and one filler to spam would be so much better than spamming Art of War endlessly and losing track of my DoTs cause I'm not targeting any specific enemy to know when to reapply it. The hassle of cycling thru every enemy for a single target DoT is wild too.

I miss Miasma II, Shadowflare, and Bane so much. The show effect on Shadowflare was amazing, and Miasma II was just gravy.

Personally, I find Art of War's effects (both visual and cast) underwhelming, and it always felt like a placeholder ability when it was introduced in Shadowbringers.
I also believe that SGE shows a step in the direction towards making healer damage output a bit more complex again, after Shadowbringers dumbed them all down to "a DoT, a filler and an AoE; maybe also an oGCD if you're lucky."

That being said, would I necessarily bring back the DoT from Miasma 2? Ehhh... no.
I mean realistically, what value did the DoT bring? You were generally spamming it in AoE pulls anyway unless you were stopping to heal, so it didn't fulfill the usual function of a DoT in "don't press this again until the DoT runs out." Its main place was just confusing people as to whether it had a spot in Scholar's single-target rotation.
Personally I would much rather SCH's AoE have some sort of useful benefit to the party's survival, like Holy's stun, SGE's skills activating Kardion, or even AST getting Macrocosmos (though I would much rather they had Urianger's slow from Gravity, but that's another thread).

Besides that, the devs appear to be taking a step away from DoT jobs in general, now that BRD has lost interest in them entirely for AoE (or even anything besides direct damage) and jobs like SMN and NIN have lost theirs altogether. Likely to do with how the game can only process so many status effects on a single entity, which made jobs with multiple sustained debuffs a giant resource hog.
The irony of Alliance Raids with over a dozen RPRs applying Death's Design notwithstanding. Maybe the fact that it's just an inert damage boost until the target dies is less resource intensive than DoTs, who knows.