Aetherial Shift vs Smudge - Please Explain

Aetherial Shift:

15 Yalm dash / learned at lvl 40 = 60 second cooldown


Smudge:

15 Yalm dash + 5s sprint afterwards / learned at lvl 20 = 20 second cooldown


Why? Genuinely curious and not just trying to gripe. I was leveling a bunch of jobs today and went from Picto to WHM and it struck me as super odd that I couldn't spam it like Picto. I looked at the traits for later levels and I didn't see anything like additionally charges. Maybe I missed something? That feels more justifiable. Just seems odd that a dash ability with less going on would have a longer cooldown.

Is it just because it's on a healer? Not trying to add fuel to the fire for our poor healers right now, serious question. If someone smarter on the balance of the game can explain I'd love to hear an opinion for why it should be longer than Picto's Smudge.

The simple answer is - different classes have different things. Perhaps they thought that being able to frequently dash fits pictomancer more than white mage. Some classes have mobility, some don't. Some dash, some teleport, some require a target or not, some have longer or shorter cooldowns, some do damage or not. Only the devs could tell you their reasonings why class X gets skill X with X cooldown - and I doubt they come into the forums and answer questions.

Same reason Dark Knight and Gunbreaker has a non-damage gapcloser, while the Paladin and Warrior have their with damage attached to them.

No idea at all. And they do seem not telling us why they make such decisions.

Picto is the new job so it has to be made more fun to play than other jobs.

Certainly wouldn't expect a dev to respond lol. Was more so curious to get with the community and see if there WAS anything more than "eh, flavor". I'm a Tank main and otherwise play RDM or RPR because healing is frankly too much responsibility for me lol. So was mostly just curious if someone who plays the role more might know something. "It wouldn't make sense / would be too much if, X" ya know?

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Originally Posted by Arrius

Same reason Dark Knight and Gunbreaker has a non-damage gapcloser, while the Paladin and Warrior have their with damage attached to them.

No idea at all.

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they do make weird decisions with abilities, like warrior dark and gun all getting their gapcloser in the 50s but paladin not getting it until 72 or blackmage and bard getting aoe at 15 but dragoon/ninja not getting aoe til lvl 40

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Originally Posted by ryouma17

they do make weird decisions with abilities, like warrior dark and gun all getting their gapcloser in the 50s but paladin not getting it until 72 or blackmage and bard getting aoe at 15 but dragoon/ninja not getting aoe til lvl 40

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Honestly, it would have been better to streamline the acquisition of the AoE rotation and gapcloser to be of the same level on all tank jobs.
Sure, this makes it appear to be just another step to homogenize all of the tanks - Though at least you can go ham with their abilities outside of it to provide a unique experience with each of them.

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Originally Posted by Arrius

Honestly, it would have been better to streamline the acquisition of the AoE rotation and gapcloser to be of the same level on all tank jobs.
Sure, this makes it appear to be just another step to homogenize all of the tanks - Though at least you can go ham with their abilities outside of it to provide a unique experience with each of them.

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Probably til they want to show us things.
Sadly at this moment, we can't deny the fact that players just want to pick at alot of changes until they either have someone more experienced tell them why it's good, or why it's bad.

and then see if it matches their end goal or not.

[aka, wait till they tell us more about 8.0 unless that was a straight lie, and not something the community will hold on them for job de-homohenization]

We can complain about differences and want the jobs to play exactly how we want em to, and not how the game could be, should be, designed to be, balanced to be, or tuned for higher end content as it usually is.

But what does it do rn. more so when we haven't even seen the first normal raid tier.

(Some people even think that SE is jumping the gun with VIPer changes this early on, with no Savage feedback. While Picto seems to remain unbalanced)

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Originally Posted by TRMeowth

Certainly wouldn't expect a dev to respond lol. Was more so curious to get with the community and see if there WAS anything more than "eh, flavor". I'm a Tank main and otherwise play RDM or RPR because healing is frankly too much responsibility for me lol. So was mostly just curious if someone who plays the role more might know something. "It wouldn't make sense / would be too much if, X" ya know?

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The one thing I could think of when comparing white mage vs pictomancer gameplay - picto gets more value out of dashes to increase dps uptime. For a healer the dash may be a 'oh shit' button when caught in a wrong position and dashing to safety, or during dungeon pulls when falling too far behind tank. For picto as a caster dashing to a safespot instead of walking means they can go back to casting more quickly. Of course you could say healer gets the same out of that, but for heal the dps uptime is secondary and a lot of heals can be used insta-cast while on the move. For a heal 3sec of walking to safety isn't much of a loss, while for a dps caster it can matter (in high-end content).

In short, optimizing uptime is more prominent in dps caster gameplay than in healer gameplay which could be the reason for the difference in cooldowns.

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Originally Posted by Arrius

Same reason Dark Knight and Gunbreaker has a non-damage gapcloser, while the Paladin and Warrior have their with damage attached to them.

No idea at all. And they do seem not telling us why they make such decisions.

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gnb and drk have morre busy burst windows, taking out the damagign gap closers let them able to weave in defensives if needed , war and pld have less ogcds, its simple, they explaining speiffially why they did this in a LL

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Originally Posted by Arrius

Same reason Dark Knight and Gunbreaker has a non-damage gapcloser, while the Paladin and Warrior have their with damage attached to them.

No idea at all. And they do seem not telling us why they make such decisions.

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Because pld and war will lose them too but they're waiting to give them replacement ogcds, because they're less busy than drk/gnb
my guess, anyway.

Probably because a WHM with a 20s CD dash would never die ... ever? The only way for a WHM to die currently is to not pay attention and be way out of position and get one shot due to a super nuke or too many vuln stacks. If you remove the need to ever pay attention to position then a WHM is going to functionally immortal.

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Originally Posted by 4clubbedace

gnb and drk have morre busy burst windows, taking out the damagign gap closers let them able to weave in defensives if needed , war and pld have less ogcds, its simple, they explaining speiffially why they did this in a LL

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That doesn't explain the massive gap in levels on each job for it. This is something each of them should get at the same moment, just like tank stances and the basic AoE rotation.

Picto has some very long cast times it has to use so it’s good to have that mobility.

Not to dismiss your post but shouldn‘t we be happy that different jobs (roles even) have different things?
Even as a blm main before DT I never looked to dancer and said „I need that“.

Healers get permanent easy slide casting, and their damage is considered a “bonus” by the devs, 100% uptime isn’t expected, as such, the dev intended solution for a healer needing to move is to stop what they’re doing and move, with the dash as a backup if they really can’t get out of the way

Picto has slidecasting for their filler, but the big part of Picto’s damage comes from the long casts from Subtractive Palette and their VERY long cast paintings, dropping a 3 second cast to dodge an AoE is painful and the mobility allows them to finish that cast and get to safety

we all know the “BLMs refuse to move” jokes, this is the same principle, it’s why BLMs get Aetherial Manipulation on a 10s CD whilst Sage and Melee get 45ish second gap closers: because like WHM Sage is expected to just drop damage and run, and melee is downtime recovery for when they’re forced out of melee because melee abilities are almost all instant, you can’t “fail” a melee ability like a cast

TLDR: PCT and BLM have much stronger mobility options because dropping long casting is the most detrimental for them, so their tools are intended to allow “greeding” rather than just survivability alone

Its quite simple really, Picto is dps and Whm isn't. All of the dps get better mobility options than their non-dps counterparts save for mch/brd but they don't need to cast and can attack from any range so I would assume they don't need them.

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Originally Posted by Azlith

Its quite simple really, Picto is dps and Whm isn't. All of the dps get better mobility options than their non-dps counterparts save for mch/brd but they don't need to cast and can attack from any range so I would assume they don't need them.

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why does dancer need them then?

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Originally Posted by Arrius

Same reason Dark Knight and Gunbreaker has a non-damage gapcloser, while the Paladin and Warrior have their with damage attached to them.

No idea at all. And they do seem not telling us why they make such decisions.

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Not quite the same comparison. They specifically said they wanted to lessen the oGCD load Dark Knight and Gunbreaker had in EW. Meanwhile, Warrior barely has any oGCDs and Paladin only has a few. So that's the reason they did that.

As for Picto over White Mage, I can assume it's because they think it's less of a big deal for healers to lose damage if they need to move. It's flimsy but does go in line with their way of thinking when it comes to the healer design.

They'll probably nerf Smudge in an upcoming patch. I wouldn't be surprised at all. Which sucks because it's a really fun skill.
If you put a gun to my head and asked me to justify the current situation, I'd bet they probably expected that WHMs wouldn't have as many issues with pre-positioning since nothing they do locks them in place quite like PCT's leylines, their new Glare is an instant cast, they can lily while moving, old glare is a really quick cast anyway allowing for easy slidecasting, and their rotation is generally 1 button so it's not like they're gonna get lost in the sauce and caught by surprise very often.

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Originally Posted by Reimmi

why does dancer need them then?

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So they can get into close range for Standard and Technical Step?