About Esuna, Exalted Detriment and Leeches change

[Vulcwen]

But it's NEEDLESS, no one will ever go without Esuna, Protect or Lucid Dreaming if they are a healer, they wont, those spells/abilities are FAR to important, I main a healer, and even when Im at the top of my game being as efficient as possible with my MP, i will start to run out of MP if I dont have a heavy means of regenerating it, and Ive been consistently praised for my healing, so I can say with no shred of vanity, that if I stopped using the Ewer Card or Luminiferous Aether, id run out of MP, granted I dont run out of MP during mob pulls, I save my MP regens for bosses IF i need them, but whether people are paying attention or not, they have come times where i didnt have any choice but to burn my MP to save people, as it is, im EXTREMELY efficient with my MP but there again have been times where I drop below 50% and heck, have even reached 10% and that was with being as efficient as humanly possible, but I can only be so efficient when people start being stupid and standing in every AoE imaginable, what then? If I have no means of MP regen, the party is screwed cause the healer, through no fault of the healer, has run out of mp.

Addendum: Ive already spoken to several healers, who have already stated they are taking Esuna, Protect, Lucid Dreaming, and the Heal Buff as ALL the time abilities. As a result, most of these neat and new Cross Roles WONT SEE USE! Also Button Bloat? Ummm HAHAHAHA the only classes Ive played that have had button bloat issues are classes like Scholar and Summoner, Scholar in that they have access to so many DoTs as do Summoners, but Astrologian and White Mage? HAHAHAHA no I have no excessive button issues because there are none!

Well, what is your point actually. With that I merely stated that by putting essential skills in the cross-role system, they overrule the current cross-class slots, thus reducing overall button count (considering you're not actually getting something in return when those skills moved to cross-role).
Before: you had esuna, protect, shroud and divine seal, in addition to cross-class skills: virus, surecast, eye for an eye, blizzard 2, swiftcast. Now, assuming you still want swiftcast, you lose 4 buttons.

Is this a good move? No, it's just a nerf, in addition to adding more opportunity cost to get those essential abilities, without actually offering a real choice to get those other ones. But it DOES remove buttons from your bar, while if they didn't move those skills to cross-role, you'd not have a net loss in skills to use, unless they simply give less slots in the cross-role system.

Scholar DoTs I don't even consider bloat, kinda.. They could put seperate/stacking DoTs on the same skill through some kind of combo mechanic to cut buttons, but all those different DoTs have gameplay value due to varying duration, initial damage, cast time and additional effects (like miasma being SCH's heavy/heal debuff, shadow flare also serving as a defensive debuff). Basically, SCH is as rotationally complex as lvl 50 SMN (and already was that back in ARR), it'll go down to current WHM complexity with the DoT pruning.

SMN DoTs aren't bloat either for the same reason, although with 4.0 they might actually be considered bloated, as they'll get used far less frequently, no longer vary in duration, and have their additional effects removed.. that makes me wonder why they have 2 dots at all instead of just 1, the entire DoT-based gameplay comes from duration differences (which gets destroyed on SMN and I'm sad about that).

[Lemuria]

I have no problem with the role skills. Mine Will be Protect, Esuna, Lucid Dreaming, Swiftcast and Largesse. I don't see the other skills being mandatory. So no complains from me. Looking forward to enjoy Stormblood

The sad part is that WHM had all of that without needing cross-role skills (aside from Swiftcast), so I'm not really seeing this as a boon for my main job here.

[Nyghtmarerobu]

That aside, spells are inherently learned by White Mage (Esuna), Astrologian (Exalted Detriment) and Scholar (Leeches) at levels 18, 18 and 40 respectively and what bothers me, is that in Stormblood, the devs are changing them from inherently learned spells to Cross-Class/Role abilities, but why? WHY do this? Why make these spells something you have to WASTE (and it is a waste no matter what the Devs or anyone says) a Cross Role slot on to use? WHO is going to leave an essential spell like these off their hot bar? And WHY would you? Alot of enemies after like lvl 20 range dungeons use detrimental effects, heck, some prior to lvl 20 do. This is a completely ill thought out, insane decision. Ive also noticed that Luminiferous Aether for Astrologians is gone, as is I think Saint Shroud for White Mages? Why were these made Cross Role skills to?.

But can you really give a better reason why you want them removed, than, "I want more different role skills!!"? Yet at the same time, in the current, you still have 0 choice in what you pick. Swiftcast, Eye, Pro, cleric, aero, stoneskin, Bliz 2. These are literally the skills you have to pick from. And yet, when esuna is moved to the crossbar, were up in arms? Its been this way for a long time.. nothing is changing, or is changing very little. People need to stop blowing up over this stuff. I praise SE for changing things for the better, yet, no one will acknoledge it. You all look at the bad side and think about how terrible its going to be for you for 5 days before you adjust and get over it. By all means tho, keep complaining and threatining to leave over such a small change.. when you have something meaningful, maybe they'll take it into consideration...

[Taika]

So is inflexibility. There's a difference between not using Esuna and not actually needing it. If the other WHM goes down for some reason and someone needs to take over their duties temporarily, that includes being able to remove debuffs.

It's folly to think it's any kind of benefit to lose a strong skill just for the sake of 'streamlining' our skill set.

In many cases though, if one healer (the Esuna healer in this case) goes down, the fight is already lost. Well, maybe that hasn't been true in Creator, and of course we can't know what it will be like in SB. I'm not really arguing that this should be how it's done in raids, I'm more just thinking out loud. Like I said in my first post in this thread, I like the idea of healers and healer teams (as well as others) having to plan their role skill setup based on the fight they're about to do. I don't argue that this upcoming system is good implementation for it. I guess I'm reserving judgment until I've seen the fights.

This whole system seems like it only makes sense for 8 person statics, while being a detriment to all other players. And it isn't even giving a benefit to those static players, it just doesn't hinder them.

I agree with what Aramina said earlier: it's not likely to be a detriment outside static content, since what you use outside static content probably won't have an significant effect on anything (unfortunately)... It might benefit static group healers, but it also might not.

[Nicodemus_Mercy]

My shared role skill choices will be:

Esuna (cleanse debuffs), Protect (party buff), Swiftcast (instant res), Lucid Dream (mp management), Largess (+20% more healing).

The only one of the above I would even consider not having is Largesss because WHM is already overloaded with ways to restore hp. But it really bugs me that I basically lost my old cross class picks just to pick up stuff I already had till they took it away from me... and I still lost stoneskin and stoneskin II with nothing given in place of them.

WHM lost 7 skills in 4.0, 5 of which ended up in shared role skills and one of which is sorta given back with a new name (Divine Benison kinda sorta replaces stoneskin), and yet WHM still ends up with less total skills than the other healers and didnt get what they've been asking for all through HW: a party wide dps buff. It just really feels like WHM got the short end of the stick in Stormblood to me.

[Aramina]

So this means that the only important, critical skills (at least to me) that will take up the 5 Cross Role slots are Protect, Esuna, Lucid Dreaming, Swiftcast and Largesse.

Then you are good. Switching them to something else, as I mentioned earlier, isn't going to be necessary for anything outside savage raiding (possible ex primals). In those cases it is probably going to be a non-issue because strategy is already discussed, this is just another tiny bit of strategizing to add to the mix.

edit: Don't take any of this as me being rah rah shared role skills because I find some of the choices slightly eyebrow-raising as well, my point is just that for non high tier raiding there isn't going to be a noticable difference (aside from things being removed entirely) between the 15th and the 16th.

[Ootarion]

But can you really give a better reason why you want them removed, than, "I want more different role skills!!"? Yet at the same time, in the current, you still have 0 choice in what you pick. Swiftcast, Eye, Pro, cleric, aero, stoneskin, Bliz 2. These are literally the skills you have to pick from. And yet, when esuna is moved to the crossbar, were up in arms? Its been this way for a long time.. nothing is changing, or is changing very little. People need to stop blowing up over this stuff. I praise SE for changing things for the better, yet, no one will acknoledge it. You all look at the bad side and think about how terrible its going to be for you for 5 days before you adjust and get over it. By all means tho, keep complaining and threatining to leave over such a small change.. when you have something meaningful, maybe they'll take it into consideration...

Two things

1) How about we move most if not all of your Enmity generators as a tank to Cross Role?

2) Esuna, Exalted Detriment, Leeches, Saints Shroud and Luminiferous Aether were always built into their respective classes and DIDNT need to be Cross Classed, now to use them we MUST Cross Role them, which means wasting Cross Role slots which could instead be used for things like the new Cleric Stance, Break, Surecast, Rescue and Eye for an Eye, instead the Cross Role menu is now cluttered up with stuff that SHOULDNT BE in there PLUS the new stuff, why is this so hard to understand? Also I never quite understood why Protect was a Cross Class and why Cleric Stance needed to be a Cross Class to, when those should have been built into all healers to begin with, but meh.

My point still stands and if you dont see my point then I dont know if I can help you understand or not.

[Aramina]

My point still stands and if you dont see my point then I dont know if I can help you understand or not.

I understand your point entirely, I just maintain that how you play in dungeons/casual raiding will not see a change. Could you play around with the new skills if Esuna/Protect/whatever didn't take up a slot? Obviously, but you won't be a worse healer with them cross-classed than you are now. I really hope that does not sound condescending because that is NOT what I am going for at all, but wording is hard sometimes.

[Ootarion]

I understand your point entirely, I just maintain that how you play in dungeons will not see a change. Could you play around with the new skills if Esuna/Protect/whatever didn't take up a slot? Obviously, but you won't be a worse healer with them cross-classed than you are now. I really hope that does not sound condescending because that is NOT what I am going for at all, but wording is hard sometimes.

That may be, but this means that the new skills, like Break and Rescue, will rarely see use, cause anyone with a brain will know to move away from an AoE or if any other such telegraphed attack is about to hit them, granted I know people wont always do so, but we shouldnt have to waste a slot on an honestly useless skill when people need to pay attention and run out of things before they happen. Also I was saying that Nyghtmarerobu wasnt getting me.

[Phixx]

So this means that the only important, critical skills (at least to me) that will take up the 5 Cross Role slots are Protect, Esuna, Lucid Dreaming, Swiftcast and Largesse and the reason I disprove of this, is because all these skills except for Swiftcast and Protect, were in someway built into the Healers, IE WHM had Saints Shroud and Divine Seal, Astrologian had Synastry which raised healing by 20% and bonded them to a target which when you heal someone else, 40% of the ASTs healing goes to the target you are bonded with, and ASTs had Luminiferous Aether which is their version of Saints Shroud it just didnt reduce Enmity. But WHM had to Cross Class Swiftcast while AST and SCH had to cross class both Protect, Swiftcast AND Cleric Stance.

Long story short, in my eyes, and evidently the eyes of others, this isnt helping anything at all. Cause the important skills that used to be built into the Healers, are now Cross Role skills they have to equip to use as if they were swiftcast.

You seem to be forgetting that current cross class is already very limited in terms of choice.

Must haves:
SCH: Cleric, Protect, Swiftcast, Aero, (Stoneskin/Blizz2)
AST: Cleric, Protect, Swiftcast, Aero, (Stoneskin/Blizz2)
WHM: Swiftcast, E4E, Virus

Extra options:
SCH: Cure, Raise, Surecast
AST: Cure, Raise, Surecast
WHM: Ruin, Physick, Surecast, Blizz2

Raise and Cure are completely useless to SCH and AST same as Ruin and Physick for WHM. So SCH and AST are essentially locked to 4/5 that they should be taking and WHM is locked to 3 with the other 2 options being mediocre.

The new system allows people who are able to coordinate Cross Role skills with each other to pick depending on the fight they are doing. Casual players like me and yourself will probably pick the same basic set of skills that will assume we are the only healer in the content or cannot realistically coordinate with a co-healer. This is fine and doesn't really change the amount of flexibility that we currently have with cross class.