now that 5.1 is 1 day away,i thought to prepare a thread that will focus all our issues we find there.
to post every new bug/problem we find out on our healers and talk about it(or simply rant about it) cause new patch means new bugs to find :) .
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now that 5.1 is 1 day away,i thought to prepare a thread that will focus all our issues we find there.
to post every new bug/problem we find out on our healers and talk about it(or simply rant about it) cause new patch means new bugs to find :) .
Lightspeed still has no charge and a stupid duration.
No one needs 15s of instant spells, but many would enjoy 9s every 60s (preferably with a charge mechanic, up to 2 charges)
This way you could LS during the opener, (if you really need it you could use both charge) and for the rest of the encounter you have more freedom on where you use lightspeed, wether it is for movement, card weaving or mp management.
15s is just... too much...
150 second Presence of Mind is super annoying
Issue with healers? Well, I suppose there is a continuing issue...
I'm beginning to believe that a good chunk of my personal complaints are tied to the need to support controllers as an on-par control scheme. Don't get me wrong, doing so has been an impressive achievement, but I can't help but think that the focus on achieving such a difficult feat has left it's mark on the game's input code - and, by necessity, ability design. The crippling of mouseover options - a standard in pretty much every other game ever at this point - is one example. It's terribly clunky to not allow fully functional mouseover casting... but if allowed, M+KB would completely smash controller in speed. So both control methods are stuck with a set of clunky tradeoffs instead. I strongly suspect that, as a natural extension of this technical reality, design-side focuses on minimizing the amount of healing (especially targeted healing) that the game asks of the player. After all, the more that you heal the more that you're forced to interact with the clunkiest part of the combat interface (rapid target switching).
I don't know that there is a good solution. I know the solution that I'd prefer: give me a tickbox to cast friendly-target and ground-target spells by mouseover while still allowing them to queue, but that's because I straight up don't care about input method balance. It's probably not healthy for the overall game if MKB becomes a de-facto necessity for healing (and even small advantages can get blown up all out of proportion into necessities by internet communities).
Off the top of my head most of my complaints are about the weirdness that is AST right now. Leveling this one after WHM was torture. There is a reason so few play AST compared to SCH and WHM.
-AST is a nightmare on controllers during sleeve draw.
-Earthly star is difficult to see on low graphics settings with friendly spells turned off when on some terrain. I seriously wish this move had CUs glowing edge instead of floaty stars. Sometimes I blow CU on the star even if I dont need the regen just because it makes everyone suddenly realize star is there.
-AST MP conservation is still awful. Noct benefic is still inexplicably stupidly expensive and doesn't even reduce during neutral sect. The class has no MP regen outside of lucid but also has short enough casts that asts generally cast slightly more spells (less canceled to movement). Most guides want 1400-1700 piety on AST but you can get away with like 900 on a WHM if you play it right. Thats a big, big difference and is a likely culprit on where the damage differences are coming from.
-Nocturnal is still bad.
-Super minor, but stances should not have a cooldown longer than 2.5seconds. The only thing this does is make you sometimes get stuck in noctural when trying to put an aspected benefic up and then the tank pulls. There is no way to abuse rapid stance dancing.
-Seraph delay is weird.
-150 second pom lines up with nothing.
As a controller player I'm gonna find myself disagreeing on this point. I have almost immediate quick access to 32 different abilities. If I were to bother getting used to it, I could add another 8 to that figure and make it 40. I can still swap cross-bar pages fairly easily, which is the clunkiest part of using a controller, but I can use 32 fluidly. Though many perhaps use 16 fluidly because they've not touched the options to customise the controller set up. But extended crossbars can be a godsend. From a healer perspective and in used to having a more complicated DPS set up than we do now, I'd be able to hold down 1 extra button on my controller and swap from "heal" mode into "DPS" mode and it worked well for me.
But SE in fairness, have made some smart ways of expanding functionality without assigning extra buttons, mudras for example are capable of producing more than 4 skills whilst only having 4 buttons. DNC was smart in replacing their DPS moves with steps when they start dancing. Designs that swap out abilities is an option for expandability. Targeting it still effective, it takes some getting used to, but they are ways of make that easier too, such at the aggro list you can cycle through and your party & alliance lists you can cycle through.
I think the disadvantage with a controller is that it has a steeper learning curve, which may be where some struggle, but their control design is very ergonomic and really intelligently done, so much so I prefer it to using a keyboard & mouse.
Except controllers could do far more than just left-right cycling (tab-targeting and reverse tab-targeting). Even just the addition of directional scanning (point stick in target's direction while an ally-targeting action is held down in queue, then left-right or click the same joystick down to fine-target from there before releasing the key to complete the queue) could help tremendously. So would the ability toThey're not just holding back M&KB for the sake of controllers. They're holding back both for the sake of artificial difficulty and/or by pure neglect.
- find a target at any time during a cast instead of having to find them beforehand (MP costs changed to MP drains over the cast time, allowing us to hold many spell at continuous minor cost while we find a target or, more often, when we excessively pre-cast for incoming damage),
- set up both an ally and enemy focus target,
- set up targeting schemata when we place an action on our hotbars [scan target > lock target > current target > focus target > target of target > target of target of target, to give an extreme example] as per, say, WoW's controller-based healing,
- stack actions as we please so that we can, say, cast Glare when targeting an enemy and Cure II when targeting an ally, with the same key (wouldn't work as well with post-targeting or target-scanning, but the buttons you save allows you more comfortable space to allocate to targeting, though the benefits would be relatively small for healers now, compared to in previous expansions).
- etc., etc...
Just so long as people aren't complaining about changes because they don't like change. I'd encourage everyone to justify and explain their complaints.
"it's good enough and not worth spending resources on" is almost certainly the fundamental explanation for the lack of UI changes re: targeting, yes. I strongly disagree with the evaluation that it's good enough, due to the cascading design problems that I described, but if there are really good controller improvements that could be made... then yeah, resources are the only block. It's tough to compete with the mouse when it comes to pointing at things though.
Or they could let macros queue, but they pretty clearly (and reasonably) do not want an understanding of macros to be a prerequisite to healing. Down that route lies WoW, etc. etc.
So far, looks like AST is getting more buffs, though I seriously doubt these will suddenly make AST spring up in terms of use, or at the very least, I cannot see it genuinely competing with the other 2 healers in savage.
As for the rest of the issues, the same issues we've been having since 5.0 launched. SCH is still boring with nothing to do bust spam broil 90% of the time, WHM with glare, and AST with a butchered card system. (albeit better than launch)
Oh yeah, do find it funny how they addressed ghosting, instead of actually fixing the problem, Square basically just said "nah, just tell the fairy to do nothing so pet GCDs don't roll between abilities", cheers mate, f*** you too.
SCH's capstone abilities clash and contradict each other rather than complement each other.
Dissipate removes the core aspect of your job. (Imagine if something completely locked out the Fire spells from BLM) and stops fairy gauge accumulation. I've never liked Dissipate. If you're in a position where you need Aetherflow stacks NOW, you're in a bad spot and losing your fairy is not what you want to do.
Fey Union is clunky, and slow.
Seraph makes Dissipate pointless.
From my personal experience
All 3 healers are a chore to do solo and story play. They play almost exactly the same outside of duties from level 30 to 80 (doing scholar on alt) and far too homonegized. While I am of the opinion that there should be some basic homogenisation (light/heavy heal, aoe heal, raise, basic attack and minimum 1 dot) I believe that too much has been pruned.They need varying attack options just as much as healing options. Not many mind you, they arent a dps job. enough to give some variation but not many.
Another big problem all healers have is the weakness of the aoe damage now. The mp costs are still high, but the effectiveness is so pitiful now there's instances where it might as well not bother with the aoe and just use single target attacks repeatedly.
jobs now
Whm has practically infinite mp, or at the very least enough mp restoration I have repeatedly been able to raise/medica 2/cure 3 repeatedly without hassle. Both during long fights and when I've just been picked off the ground after an occasional lapse of judgement
Whm also doesnt have anything to manipulate its lillies with aside from instant heals. A little bit of decision making could be introduced where you can burn a lilly for something like a shield or a damaging hit instead. Not gaining lillies outside of combat should stay though.
As a whm, I should not be spending 90% of my time casting glare/stone and be able to top everybody off with a single aoe afflatus rapture+plenary indulgence or assize in most content at 80
Whm has also lost its druid like identity. Its only casting pure light magic now, no stone, no wind, and we haven't used water magic yet we look at Rdm and Yshtola with their aeros, stones and water 4 aoe nuke.
1/2
Astrologian...where do I start? Everything about its identity got removed between 3.5 and 5.0. The utility healer became a damage up bot where most of the time the numbers aren't noticable. While I am sympathetic to the devs wanting to reduce synergy, there's reducing synergy and removing it in all but name
Astrologian's other main problem is lack of mp tools particularly with nct sect
Potencies are finally up to reasonable levels for the most part in 5.1. Gravity is still weak though and its either needs a status effect or a potency boost for the first enemy.
Astrologian is the support in the healer trio, alongside Whm's super heals and Sch shields and dps. The current card system is soul crushing and as a ps4 player the play action did nought but hinder me.
From what I can see, a reasonable compromise on the old card system would have worked. Balance and spire were in need of a rework. I would offer these changes:
Balance: If given to a healer, boosts damage by 10%. If given to dps or tank, gives them a bloodbath style effect restoring hp each attack = 10% of attack potency.
Bole: Reduces damage by 10% for and heals the target equivalent to a 400 potency benefic.
Ewer: Restores 3000 mp to the target
Spire: Lowers the casting time for casters or the gcd for non casters (can't give a figure here, not very clear on gcd timings)
Arrow: Increases crit rate by 10%
Spear: Increases direct hit rate by 10%
Additionally, spread and royal road should come back, but royal road should be restricted to aoe at 50% potency or less.
Nocturnal astrologian is still inferior to Diural in terms of mp and its shields frankly are awful. Additionally, they aren't stackable unlike diurnal's regens.
Astrologian as a whole also lost its time mage stuff. Stun on CO and Time dilate were fun and useful abilities, particularly in mobs and raids respectively
Collective uncouncious needs some serious buffing given it roots the player, prevents them from abilities especially with the more mobile fights we're getting.
Scholar is in the same boat as Astrologian in that the entirety of its identity and many of its core skills got gutted. I'm not that experienced with Scholar but I can tell there's a few issues.
In addition, what the hell were the devs thinking adding a delay to the seraph? Seraph needs a slight boost to time and delay removed so we can get consolation done right.
Scholar I have noticed also has trouble dealing with a Drk's LD. Given the devs don't seem to be changing that any time soon I have brought it up. Lustrate plus some hopeful crits seem to be the way most Sch's try to remove the walking dead status.
Scholar's dpser of the healers also went to pieces in 5.0. I would suggest bringing at least one more dot to the kit again and bringing a buff to Art of war's potency. Bane as well.
As a final note, I would also think something for the scholar to use the fairy for a dps attack (could be very useful solo)
2/2
My main issue with AST is that the Play button was introduced and screwed up my hotbars. The class has enough buttons to push it would be nice if Draw/Play was the same button again.
Honestly, the scholar just is not fun to play anymore especially when doing pre-shadow bringer content and solo shadow bringer content. It is not fun to have a stale boring DPS management system, it is not fun to no longer be able to control the fairy simultaneously to the scholar when healing.
Seraph remains clunky and still awkward to use in combat, I find myself always shielding extra because I never know if Consolation will be out in time. I can subscribe to the thought that Scholar is about thinking ahead, preparing well ahead after knowing the fight, but then it's something they could have communicated with after they made the pet hotbar react faster than ever in StB only to throw the whole thing out the window. Love reading about technical difficulties and how it was dealt with in software and and I'm sure there is a story here. I would like to think they are getting better at seperating SCH and SMN, but they still seem to share some code in the pet department and they can't be efforted to make it different. I would like to be proven wrong, but SE is still tight-lipped about this and healers in general.
Reading the LL digest I came across something peculiar:
"There were many varying opinions in the bard feedback that we received. For example, some players were fine with bard focusing on personal damage, while others asked for more party support in exchange for personal damage. Though we had an incredibly difficult time making a decision, in the end, we decided to keep as much of bard’s current personal damage as possible while adding support effects to their songs."
This sounds like the same heavy-hand approach SCH got and they made Bard a damage machine, but then some asked for some support options back. And they not only mentioned it but also implemented it in exchange for damage. Where is this mysterious group of players SE is actually conscidering concerns from and acknowledgning? If I could meet these players and ask how much it would cost to make them say 'Scholar is a clunky mess of bad decisions' and watch SE at the very least recognize concerns raised here. Like getting Selene back for support options. If their Balance Bot 3000 screams that Fey Wind's 3% haste, Fey silence and aeo esuna would throw the balance into turmoil then I have several ideas of what fat could be trimmed off, Chain Strat and Seraph for starters. Imagine the Live Letter: "Next we have a question from our Bard players: Why is Scholar a clunky.... oh Aha! Almost got us there! You almost made us talk about Scholars. Ha ha, nice try now go back to Broiling."
Piety is nearly useless at the moment.
I play Whitemage and Scholar, and if you use Lucid Dreaming regulary, you should have no MP problems at all.
Now, I got the ilvl 460 "Deepshadow Signum" staff for my whitemage. I was looking for the ilvl 465 staff from Hades (Kelesis) as an upgrade. Now I see that that staff has +455 Piety and I would lose nearly the same amount of Critical Hit, if I change to that staff. Doesn't feel right to me, actually.
I think: Piety should give you magic resistence or another secondary value next to the MP regeneration. At the moment it's a stat you try to avoid (because other stats are far more valuable), and that shouldn't be the case in my opinion.
SCH class design:
-Fairy tether- locks your fairy out of her three core abilities in exchange for a mildly potent single target channeled heal that consumes resource and has limited range.
-Dissipation- locks the scholar out of her pet completely, in exchange for a full stack of aetherflow and 20% increased healing. Fairy gauge doesnt accumulate for the duration so those three stacks of AF lose their value.
-Summon Seraph- locks your fairy out of her Fairy tether and Veil abilities in exchange for stronger heals and two charges of mild Aoe heal + shield.
Nothing in SCH's kit builds up. They are just loose CD's that you spend.
Nocturnal is still bad.
Nocturnal feels bad (still), and honestly the CU change is starting to feel more and more like a nerf. When it had a regen effect, that felt like a necessary (albeit weak at 50 potency pre5.1) part of the toolkit.
Would it break the game to give Nocturnal one thing that's objectively better (hot + mitigation for 15 seconds) than the Diurnal equivalent? On paper Nocturnal will look like "it gets more," but in practice and usage Diurnal's gameplay would still win out. The choice won't ever be, "which CU is better?," it's going to be "my cohealer is XXX, I'll respond by switching to the complementary sect." When I'm playing with a SCH, I don't miss my Nocturnal CU bubble. Whatever, that's covered. When I'm playing with a WHM, I still desperately miss and wish for the hot aspect of CU. It wasn't much, but it was all I had. Now, we don't even have that. Using CU as Nocturnal feels empty. The animation is over in a blink, and people get the buff icon... but nothing really seems to happen. No heals, and that unseen damage mitigated by the blue icon are... still unseen.
Sleeve Draw's still a mess for controller. The opener is either a targeting mess with needing to use directional buttons for selecting 3 players in the span of 3 gcds and the boss in between, or it's finicky with macros. I can't see a middle ground between the two extremes until the whole card system is examined from a controller player's perspective.
No mana regen/utility still feels bad. AST has a lot to do and it doesn't need another button, but there's got to be a solution, even if it is attaching mana to an ability we already use. What if Horoscope's second pop restored mana? Or Synergy was reworked to be a font of gradual health restoration for the target and mana for the AST?
I'm coming around to the position of "just rip out nocturnal since neutral sect makes it all but irrelevant anyway."
And the more that I play Scholar, the more I agree that the level 70+ fairy abilities feel really janky and/or marginal.
My problem with Scholar isn’t as much the dps; I can take or leave the amount of DoTs / Damage spells I have as long as I have decent ways to support the party in some way, offensively or defensively. I honestly wouldn’t even mind using GCDs on defensive buffs if they made them a thing. That said, I think giving Scholar some DoT spells with debuff effects and lower potency than Biolysis / Broil to compensate would be a nice middle-way between ‘more damage’ and ‘more support’. Maybe even with a high MP cost. I think one of Scholar’s biggest issues is that we have so many powerful oGCDs that we rarely have to actively work to keep the party alive. Not that this doesn’t apply to other healers too, but I feel it’s most apparent on Scholar. That said, I wouldn’t suddenly quit the job if they returned loads of DoTs etc, since it’s not like it hasn’t been like that before.
In terms of the fairy, I wonder if making fairy abilities work like Egi actions would make them less clunky to use. Costing a gcd, but with a stronger effect to compensate (though maybe keep Consolation off-cooldown to try and minimise ghosting. Or at least make it so that if you command the fairy to use an ability, the effect always goes off even if the fairy is in a transition between Eos / Seraph.
Seraph is really cool but I agree that the abilities could use different effects to make it feel more like an ‘upgrade’ than a shiny version of the original. Maybe they could even have summoning it give some sort of passive effect like Phoenix or Bard’s songs, thought it’d have to be super weak and it wouldn’t really add much to the ability.
Overall I don’t have a problem with Scholar’s skill set on-paper, but then you go into actual content and it’s like ‘I’m only using 3 of the abilities I have and the rest basically just directly restore HP in some way’. And then you soon realise that your healing oGCDs are powerful enough to deal with the vast majority of the healing, so you have a bunch of ‘heals target’ spells (and even some oGCDs) you don’t want to use, 1 attack spell you use every 30 seconds and 1 attack spell you use for like 90% of a fight.
I don’t even disagree with their reasoning tbh. I assume they wanted to make it easier to deal ‘respectable’ / ‘decent’ damage as a healer whilst still keeping the party fully healed. But then they keep healing requirements extremely low, despite designing the healers as if we were constantly going to be on the precipice of death.
Sometimes I find myself spamming Broil thinking ‘what should I do now?’ before quickly realising ‘oh, nothing’ and just Broiling some more. That’s the best way to describe my problem with Scholar currently
Addendum: they made such a big deal of ‘separating Scholar and Arcanist’, but we still have the same Ruin II spell we’ve had since 2.0. Couldn’t that have gotten an animation upgrade like Bio II becoming Biolysis instead of Bio III. I’m sure it wouldn’t be too much of a challenge to create a new instant cast spell animation for something that’s more tailored towards Scholar
Side note: I wish that the Summon Seraph button turned into the Seraph AoE heal+shield while she was summoned. It feels odd that those don't consolidate.
Very much this. Healer gameplay right now is spam 1, use your CDs if someone's hurt, use your healing spells if you don't have any CDs available.
Each passing expansion makes us heal less and less, we have less damage options, less things to worry about, less interaction.
When was the last time we actually got new spells?
Let me see, WHM got Afflatus spells in 5.0, and... well, that's it.
In two whole expansions, we got potency boosts, less spells, and a metric crapton of CDs.
What does Plenary do? Oh, it makes it so you need to use Medica once instead of twice. Celestial Opposition/Intersection? They're just a free Aspected Helios/Benefic. Excogitation? Lustrate but better. Fey blessing? Free Indom.
I wish our new abilities had more identity than "this spell but free/better/faster".
After playing the new version of SMN, I honestly think this is going to be the best way to go. Some may not like it, but the current state isn't optimal.
I basically called this the second I saw they finalized what they were doing with healer spells.
AST feels a lot better with the change to minor arcana and collective unconcious isnt a massive joke anymore. However its mp issues are still prevalent esp under noct. Diurnal still feels superior esp now you can shield under diurnal with celestial intersection.
Still the encounter design makes both tanking and healing boring. It feels like they lowered the bar so much for both roles they equally come up as adventurer in need now.
It was an early stage dread when a friend posted some leaks and I asked "Is there more? There has to be more, right?" Then the media tour embargo lifter and I read with dread on almost every single impression of Scholar: "This isn't so exciting, but I don't player healer so maybe those of you who do will like it." Cue five months later we got a built-in delay to Seraph.
I mean I would very much rather be online enjoying Scholar right now hadn't writing about the job and trying to get SE's attention be that much riveting than playing the current iteration.