Meaningful decision making please

I speak as an AST main. I like the new sparkly animations the LL showed us for my job! I am not so keen on the fact that again my cards feel less meaningful. The "luck of the draw" was a big part I loved when I joined ffxiv in Stormblood. The old cards were so fun because I had some decision making to do that felt meaningful. Then Shadowbringers came and it all became balance because of people's obsession with getting that orange parse and the irritation of waiting on that aoe balance for an opener..

Nobody was forcing these players to sit for the perfect opener, nobody forced them into playing the healer with more RNG aspects. It was what made AST unique and fun for me.

Now they remove my seals being needed at all for anyone but myself? D: And even if the seals variety gives me some small buffs, I am a healer because I look to heal and augment my team mates not just myself, I play DPS jobs for working with all the self buffs etc.

I would like SE to bring back meaningful decision making in combat again. Everything just being a damage buff, removing the job's identity for the sake of consistency of dmg. No thank you! It surely could be frustrating when I would get 7 of the same seal in a row thanks to some cursed luck! But it was oh so sweet when I draw the right card at the right time! The heart of the cards is gone and I would like it back!

The only thing I see needing much planning at all now is placing my earthly star to be cooked in time for raid dmg incoming. That's it. Even now my cards I just throw out without thought or care beyond what dmg type the player I give the buff too does. As another job I loved an ast giving me the zoomies or making me tankier! It was variety that made this job so fun. And the homogenising of the job has made it much more dull to play. Even my, "you get a card, you get a card, everybody gets a card!" Sleeve draw was removed as people could not keep up? If you cannot keep up with a jobs playtyle, if you don't like rng why in the hell would you still be trying to play astro? There are other jobs and healers that would suit you more as an individual.

I don't play scholar because there is a lot of the job to me that felt clunky and I didn't like it, I didn't play the job well to say the least! But it doesn't mean I would want the job to change to suit me. Please SE stop making changes to a job that alienates it's core players. Give us meaningful decisions to make during combat. I can do my job with my brain turned off and it is not fun to play as it was previously.

SCH mains, WHM mains do chime in with what you feel would be meaningful decision making for your jobs!

I crave that HW SCH i was such a busy bee and it felt glorious and as we have progressed it feels like SCH has become more of a hollow shell. I totally recognise that the game and the complexity faff has moved on and I still play SCH and still enjoy it but not as much, it is my FF14 identity funny enough and I am sticking with my Faerie.

I think as this expansion climaxes the story it then gets me to a cross roads. If the story isn't compelling for me to stay then it maybe time for something new. I have been playing since beta and non ever had a break as of now.

So it gets me to your original point and I cant absolutely identify the parallel themes of it. I would say give the new AST a go and see how you feel in EW and if it doesn't make you happy then maybe another job? I have SMN/RDM on tap also.

Anyway personally I keep in my mind that this is leisure and if stops being that for me then another game or break is needed.

A meaningful decision is only possible after some major overhauls and additions.

Scholar:
Rework Dissipation, the job gauge and make seraph an actual upgrade to the fairy. Physick, Aldo and Succor on oGCD as pure shields, please. Interactive DPS rotation and remove old and ugly-looking spells or upgrade their visuals. Thank you!

White mage:
Spiritual Ray, Tornado, Flood, Water III and a channel spell that is causing an earthquake. Remove the pointless abilities please, the cure tree is better of deleted together with the medica one and instead give more water-based healing oGCDs. One for ST and one for AoE regen and make the job gauge interact with the whole kit. Fire is part of nature so I think they should expand on the lore(not that I have read it but I am assuming there is a reason why we never had fire spells), ditch the white fluff and make us feel like real nature mages. Conjurer is not a synonym for cleric or a healing bot. It is more closely related to sorcerer and wizard. If they want us to feel like white mages they could give us some ultimate light-based abilities, that we can use to heal or attack while we are in some trance. Thank you!

As a SCH main who started at the tail end of Stormblood, I only briefly got to experience the old SCH kit, and am mostly familiar with the current state of healers.

I still see a decent amount of meaningful decision making in my current SCH gameplay. For me, this comes from all the different healing options I have:
When the tank takes some damage I'll slap them with an Adlo because the shields will give some time for my fairy to top them up, but if it's a DPS, I'll probably just put a quick Physick on them since they probably wont take more damage for a while.
When the tank is taking continuous heavy hits, I have the choice of giving them Excog, giving me some time to do damage until it triggers, or I could do Fey Union to apply some powerful regen for a while, maybe coupled with an Adlo.
When there's some party-wide damage coming up, I can precast Succor and Sacred Soil to get some shields going, or I could use Fey Illumination and then Fey Blessing and maybe that will be enough.

I could keep going, but I think you get the point - there's still a ton of split-second decision making going on when I play healer. All healers have a large and intricate kit of spells that are all better or worse in different situations, and part of getting good as a healer player is learning when to use which spells.

That's not to say that I'm happy with the upcoming changes though. You might have noticed that I said all healers have a big kit of healing spells. Although I was using SCH-specific examples of decision making, almost all of them aren't far from the decisions you have to make as a AST or to a lesser extent, even WHM. There are only so many ways you can organize heals, shields, and some damage mitigation. To make up for this, the different healer jobs each have unique abilities that make them stand out from the rest, giving them a small niche of what they're best at. For AST, that's managing the randomness of the cards and the tactics of placing powerful buffs on the right people at the right time. For SCH, that's managing their fairy and manipulating shields. WHM is probably the most boring in this aspect, but has always retained their niche of managing their lily gauge to pull off some of the most powerful pure heals and in some cases high damage.
Over the past few expansions, I think squenix has slowly minimized the unique aspects of all the healers to make them more in line with each other - in other words, homogenized them. I think this trend continues with Endwalker, and I'm really disappointed to see it happen. AST gets de-emphasized cards and buffs, while SCH gets de-emphasized fairy pet management.

I agree in stormblood, a friend suggested that to me play the astrologian and said that I would like this class, my initial class was a dragoon. And it was fun to play with random cards, with a lot of thoughts about what to burn and what might be needed and for what situation. And it was fun to read thanks from the ninjas-samurais-monks after giving them 150% arrow power(for new player, old arrow got you 10% skill-spell spd and reduce recast time). But then they decided to remove the synergy and killed half of the class's uniqueness, games with cards and their strategy of use, up to 2 variations of range-melee dps. Now they are going to kill the second plus it's "Healing Variation" (although not completely since the neutral stance will still provide shields), and i'm play in nocturnal sect 95% of time cause I like prevent dmg and it why I'm going to play like AST-Sage in EW.. Having completely killed the initial concept of the class, it was ridiculous to hear their excuses about "we thought for a very long time whether to give the rest of the healers a stun like whm's Holy because it will kill the uniqueness of the class". Great, not only did this nonsense annoy the whole 5.0 (while playing on the tank, I hate having whm in the party in the dungeons, since the mob control skills and timing for the tank are not important, holy will ruin everything) The astologian had one stun with a long CD and they removed it without taking control from the whm. Because of this, I no longer touched whm in 5.0, most likely only a couple of times for pvp. This is an imbalanced class in my eyes, which is why I am not going to do anything with this garbage until they add to another heals good stun or remove stun from Holy. So the only thing to wait for is the prepatch information about the skills in order to understand all the changes comprehensively, but SE went with an emphasis on tough casualness for the players, so the complication of the gameplay should not be expected until the development policy of the game changes or they decide to return the interestingness and diversity to the mechanics battle.
The "schoolboy" never attracted me with his fairies summons like and summoner. But my friend is very upset that the SCH is again deprived in comparison with others.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Epowerj

As a SCH main who started at the tail end of Stormblood, I only briefly got to experience the old SCH kit, and am mostly familiar with the current state of healers.

I still see a decent amount of meaningful decision making in my current SCH gameplay. For me, this comes from all the different healing options I have:
When the tank takes some damage I'll slap them with an Adlo because the shields will give some time for my fairy to top them up, but if it's a DPS, I'll probably just put a quick Physick on them since they probably wont take more damage for a while.
When the tank is taking continuous heavy hits, I have the choice of giving them Excog, giving me some time to do damage until it triggers, or I could do Fey Union to apply some powerful regen for a while, maybe coupled with an Adlo.
When there's some party-wide damage coming up, I can precast Succor and Sacred Soil to get some shields going, or I could use Fey Illumination and then Fey Blessing and maybe that will be enough.

I could keep going, but I think you get the point - there's still a ton of split-second decision making going on when I play healer. All healers have a large and intricate kit of spells that are all better or worse in different situations, and part of getting good as a healer player is learning when to use which spells.

---

Your mention of split-second decision doesn't exist or shows a lack of knowledge/skill. Or it's the first week of a newly released content and the people with you stand in every aoe, forcing you to use GCDs for healing.

As players optimize their gameplay GCDs are almost exclusively used for the same dps button, much less the "should not exist anymore" physick spell. Succor/Adlo might get uses when the boss disappears or for very specific occasions but other than that it's full on broil spam.

In fact, we have so many oGCD heals than unless a DPS teases you and stays in every aoe, you'll just broil/glare/malefic, while using your oGCD heal for when the big damage comes up.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Teno

Your mention of split-second decision doesn't exist or shows a lack of knowledge/skill. Or it's the first week of a newly released content and the people with you stand in every aoe, forcing you to use GCDs for healing.

As players optimize their gameplay GCDs are almost exclusively used for the same dps button, much less the "should not exist anymore" physick spell. Succor/Adlo might get uses when the boss disappears or for very specific occasions but other than that it's full on broil spam.

In fact, we have so many oGCD heals than unless a DPS teases you and stays in every aoe, you'll just broil/glare/malefic, while using your oGCD heal for when the big damage comes up.

---

I don't think it's fair to completely discount GCD heals just because they're not optimal for DPS. If you have a skilled party that does almost everything correctly, you're right, you can usually get away with minimal GCD heals. However, in most day-to-day content, party members will mess up and take damage that you'll need GCD heals to get through. The GCD heals are there for a reason after all. In fact, some of the most fun I've had playing healer wasn't doing extreme trials where everything went perfectly, it was times when the party messed up and I had to pull out some crazy moves to recover.

Either way though, I think my original point still stands, even if we look at just oGCD abilities. In my opinion, the issue isn't that there aren't any meaningful decisions in healer gameplay. The issue is that the decisions you need to make as a healer have been homogenized across all the jobs, leading to a lack of class identity. In other words, I think the unique, stand-out abilities of each healer job have been de-emphasized, which brings them more in line with each other, but also makes each individual job less interesting to play.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Aelin_Ashryver

Then Shadowbringers came and it all became balance because of people's obsession with getting that orange parse and the irritation of waiting on that aoe balance for an opener..

---

Pretty much. One one hand we have people who can't read tool tips and on the other we have ACT fetishists. So in order to please both we have boring MSQ fights and balancing to the point where entire job identities get eroded.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Epowerj

I don't think it's fair to completely discount GCD heals just because they're not optimal for DPS. If you have a skilled party that does almost everything correctly, you're right, you can usually get away with minimal GCD heals. However, in most day-to-day content, party members will mess up and take damage that you'll need GCD heals to get through. The GCD heals are there for a reason after all. In fact, some of the most fun I've had playing healer wasn't doing extreme trials where everything went perfectly, it was times when the party messed up and I had to pull out some crazy moves to recover.

Either way though, I think my original point still stands, even if we look at just oGCD abilities. In my opinion, the issue isn't that there aren't any meaningful decisions in healer gameplay. The issue is that the decisions you need to make as a healer have been homogenized across all the jobs, leading to a lack of class identity. In other words, I think the unique, stand-out abilities of each healer job have been de-emphasized, which brings them more in line with each other, but also makes each individual job less interesting to play.

---

Well you need even less GCD heals in regular content though. I also love when everything goes wrong but even then it's mostly oGCDs that you keep for these situations, since once again, we have so many. And I wish we could have fun when things go smoothly too.

I agree with you in your second paragraph of course.

For SCH I wanted quite a bit, but most of it was QoL and button consolidation focused:
- Add another DPS oGCD to manage alongside Energy Drain. Have its DPS affected by Aetherflow heals and Fey Union somehow (I usually put old QA's effect here for this). This also acts as a soft nerf to Energy Drain without actually nerfing it.
- A return to Multiple DoTs and Bane by adding the latter to Deployment Tactics (if targeted on an enemy) and the former to the regular rotation.
- Bane would also spread Chain Stratagem and Deploy's CD would get buffed to 60s to account for Bane's existence.
- Seraph merged with Dissipation ala SMN trances as a charge-based cooldown (set to 90s, though 60s could work just fine since both are effectively available half as often as that).
- Dissipation buffed to act as a DPS cooldown by making it buff Spell potency (thereby affecting Broil spam but not ED).
- Slap Fey Blessing and Consolation together. Balance Fey Blessing's by increasing its potency and Fey Gauge cost.
- AoE Fey Union absorb's Fey Illumination's current effects in the process.


One that I have come around on recently though is a way to get old Embrace back with less micro involved. Basically, a new cooldown, called Guiding Embrace, that has the SCH apply a unique buff to a party member. All it does is change the fairy's target priority to 'whoever has the buff' for some short duration. Set its CD slightly lower than the buff duration to highlight this (say 5s CD and 15s duration respectively). You do have to make the effect drop off the first party member when used on a new person though, or it doesn't work for micro at all. Still, that's old Embrace back without nearly as much carpal tunnel involved.

They probably are doing some of that tbh.