Sch wishlist for 5.0

[Transient_Shadow]

Snip

What are you even talking about? You said single target. Miasma II is 200 potency. Broil II is 230. aka dps loss. Two or more targets is when you start weaving again.

[Maltothoris]

What are you even talking about? You said single target. Miasma II is 200 potency. Broil II is 230. aka dps loss. Two or more targets is when you start weaving again.

To put it this way as someone else put it

"It's better to use Miasma 2 to weave. Plus while the potency is 200 it's slightly higher because it's affected by SPS. Still isn't better than Broil though." (Not my words)

The thing to remember is that broil2 cast and recast is the gcd so there is a potential for clipping there. Miasma 2 is instant and you can weave energy drain with it. You can even look at fflogs and you will that a good amount of the fastest runs, the sch in the group will use miasma at least 15 times.

But other than that in terms of a wishlist:

1. More spells in that could use up the fairy gauge
2. Adjustments to SCH aldo cause its potential to cheese mechanics and lb generation is a bit too strong.
3. Trait that upgrades bio 2 and miasma to something unique to the Sch.

More to come

[Grimoire-M]

What are you even talking about? You said single target. Miasma II is 200 potency. Broil II is 230. aka dps loss. Two or more targets is when you start weaving again.

You clearly don't understand how this game works, then. The engine locks you in place for a minimum period (.75 seconds, last I recall, plus ping if you don't queue a spell or ability ahead of time) in order to play animations. This includes the animations that play whenever you use a spell or weaponskill with a cast time (which locks you out of using anything while that cast bar fills up), and including abilities such as Energy Drain, Lustrate, and so on. Every spell or ability has a minimum animation time you have to abide by, and because of this minimum time, using Energy Drain inbetween Broil IIs yields less overall DPS compared to using it after casting Miasma II, because you get to use it while your Global Cooldown Timer (which most spells and weaponskills operate on) is rolling down, instead of having no time to due to the cast time of Broil II taking up that entire period, resulting in what people call clipping (short for animation clipping, which refers to any period where any animation prevents you from regaining control of your character as described above, in this game's case it prevents you from using another GCD spell to keep that timer rolling as soon as possible). That's the crux of this issue.

[Sylvain]

To put it into numbers in case it's still not clear

If you do BroilII -> Energy Drain -> BroilII you do 230+150+230 potency over 5.75s (2.5+0.75+2.5, even tho ED is instant you have that animation lock Grimoire-M just talked about, and you have to take it into account). So we have 610potency over 5.75, so 106potency per sec for these 2 gcd

If you do MiasmaII -> Energy Drain -> BroilII you do 200 + 150 + 230 over 5.00s (here you don't take the 0.75 because it happens while the GCD is ticking because MiasmaII is instant)
So we have 580 potency over 5s, which is 116 potency per sec

To do a proper dps comparison you would have to do it over the course of an entire 45s cycle. But what I just wrote should be enough to show you that it is in fact a dps gain to use Miasma2 to weave ED.

Altough it is a dps gain, I wouldn't call it a "major dps gain"

Clipping all 3 ED (or any ogcd actually) would make you loose 2.1s of dps which is almost a broil2. While they will effectively stack up over the course of a fight (assuming you clip every single ED) that would result in a loss of 6-8 broil over the course of a regular fight. That alone shouldn't break your dps. In my personal experience, most healer loose much more just by not having their GCD rolling all the time which is the first source of dps loss.

However, SCH having many ogcd, if you clip absolutely every single ogcd, not only the Aetherflux spells, then you will see a major difference in your dps.

This issue could be easily fixed if SE would simply apply AST treatment with Malefic to the two other healers

[Grimoire-M]

However, SCH having many ogcd, if you clip absolutely every single ogcd, not only the Aetherflux spells, then you will see a major difference in your dps.

This, so much.

It becomes major when you then factor in that you're able to combine another oGCD alongside ED and Miasma II in order to free up room for another Broil II later on. In addition to all the Aetherflow abilities, you have Aetherpact/Rouse/Chain/Shadowflare/ET/Deploy/Dissipation and all of the Role action cooldowns you can weave in as well. SCH's ability to doubleweave on demand and maintain DPS while on the move is the primary advantage it has over the other two healers. Ruin II hasn't been updated in order to help balance their DPS out as a result. Miasma II breaks that rule in certain situations.

Also, Pet Actions break all of the above because they're tied to your pet's GCD, not your own. They work on a similar, but wonkier system that is governed by server checks on top of animation lock, but you can still weave them while you're casting your own spells, as long as the spell is on the pet hotbar and you watch your fairy's Embrace casts. In theory, this enables some super heavy micromanagement windows, such as slidecasting Broil II into melee range while commanding Eos to move underneath the boss before popping Miasma II so you can put Excog on the main tank while also telling Eos to use Whispering Dawn and intentionally resetting Aetherflow's cooldown just in time for you to pop it in that same two GCDs while enabling you to DPS through a weak Raidwide AoE followed by an immediate Tank Buster. It's ridiculous yet also completely possible to do that with the current system.

[Sylvain]

This, so much.

snip

Yeah well, the list of "what clips" with SCH is very extensive
It was just to show (and support) your claim.
I also specifically pointed that a few clipping isn't a big deal (like, "only" EF) but it can go out of hand if you clip everything.
Good reminder on pet action I forgot about it.

@Trensient_Shadow : However, no matter what happen, priority is still to heal no matter how much clipping you do. A dead group does 0 dps (and this will affect more your rdps than clipping)
Avoiding clipping is something you learn to do overtime, basically see it as a mean to progress.
First, you learn to efficiently heal the fight
Then, you try to improve your dps by upkeeping your DoTs and having a maximum amount of Broil cast
Finally, you start replacing some Broil by MiasmaII to avoid clipping, thus increasing your dps.

It makes me wonder if they could do something in 5.0 alike to the lenience we get with stutter-stepping, allowing oGCD animations to flow into GCDs earlier without cancelling them, cutting the maximal clipping time down from the average ~.7 seconds to .4 or less.

Of course, there are also just some animations which are stupidly (sometimes even to the point of self-contradiction, in the case of Swiftcast) long that could just be individually revised.

The ~.75s rule of thumb is accurate in most cases, but not all. Right now, on my 1.8s GCD Monk I can double-weave with just a bit of clipping between certain oGCDs (e.g. EF-SP) but that clipping is scarcely reduced by RoF's 15% Attack Speed penalty, when it should help massively; there may already be some hidden scaling going on behind everything. Whatever is, though, it's not enough.

While I don't want to remove the value of clip-conserving skills -- just make the a little less necessary while reducing their potency gap a tiny bit, til it's mostly based on mobility instead of equal parts that and oGCD access -- if we could reduce it to below .5s naturally, we'd hit a new breakpoint for reducing output loss on the 80% GCD casts like most ST healing spells and the like. Add a 20% cast speed reduction, reduced by 5% per rank, to Enochian and you'd be able to weave after Fire and Thunder III, as well, not just Firestarter and Thundercloud.

Well, I don't think they can remove the animation lock, it seems to be part of the whole "clunky server side" issue. I mean, just making Mudra client side with a shorter animation lock seems to have been a complicated thing to do.

One very simple change they can do is reducing Broil, StoneIV cast to 1.5s
I mean, that didn't solve ALL AST clipping issue, but it sure helped a freaking lot.
Beside my Starplacement I barely clip anything (some bad habit remains)

For BLM, perhaps a future rework of ... I forgot the name of that spell... you know the instant crap one ... could help
Or simply making Fire1 a 1.5s cast (that would help a lot of BLM learn the job)

Or ultimately (I don't see that happening) Allow OGCD to be cast while casting.
Some skill have this property in WoW, like, you can use Fireblast while casting a Fireball on a mage.
But this will defintely never happen, the game engine seems to be too clunky to allow such a thing

[Shurrikhan]

Well, I don't think they can remove the animation lock, it seems to be part of the whole "clunky server side" issue. I mean, just making Mudra client side with a shorter animation lock seems to have been a complicated thing to do.

One very simple change they can do is reducing Broil, StoneIV cast to 1.5s
I mean, that didn't solve ALL AST clipping issue, but it sure helped a freaking lot.
Beside my Starplacement I barely clip anything (some bad habit remains)

For BLM, perhaps a future rework of ... I forgot the name of that spell... you know the instant crap one ... could help
Or simply making Fire1 a 1.5s cast (that would help a lot of BLM learn the job)

Or ultimately (I don't see that happening) Allow OGCD to be cast while casting.
Some skill have this property in WoW, like, you can use Fireblast while casting a Fireball on a mage.
But this will defintely never happen, the game engine seems to be too clunky to allow such a thing

There does have to be some sort of fixed minimum lockout timer though, especially given that it applies identically with client side animations like Mudras (just at a shorter lock), which could then be reduced... arbitrarily.

These were also shorter back before the shift to the SB framework back in way late HW. There was a point just after the servers were moved down the street from me where my Ninja could get Suiton off with barely clipping and my SkS Monk could double-weave. I was done raiding by then, took a break for a month, and when I came back, could barely single-weave despite still using WTFast at the same low ping outside of the spike-y times of day and only packet loss increased (though that by... a lot).

Allegedly during HW there was a period of time where one could hack one's GCD speed that some of the higher end guilds were using to get alt gear runs done even faster, alongside shits-and-giggles-runs and they had to change over some code to prevent that, much like preventing speedhacking (client trust of movement) and position-hacking before for PvP? It seems to have had unintended consequences elsewhere.

[Shurrikhan]

However, SCH having many ogcd, if you clip absolutely every single ogcd, not only the Aetherflux spells, then you will see a major difference in your dps.

It makes me wonder if they could do something in 5.0 alike to the lenience we get with stutter-stepping, allowing oGCD animations to flow into GCDs earlier without cancelling them, cutting the maximal clipping time down from the average ~.7 seconds to .4 or less.

Of course, there are also just some animations which are stupidly (sometimes even to the point of self-contradiction, in the case of Swiftcast) long that could just be individually revised.

The ~.75s rule of thumb is accurate in most cases, but not all. Right now, on my 1.8s GCD Monk I can double-weave with just a bit of clipping between certain oGCDs (e.g. EF-SP) but that clipping is scarcely reduced by RoF's 15% Attack Speed penalty, when it should help massively; there may already be some hidden scaling going on behind everything. Whatever is, though, it's not enough.

While I don't want to remove the value of clip-conserving skills -- just make the a little less necessary while reducing their potency gap a tiny bit, til it's mostly based on mobility instead of equal parts that and oGCD access -- if we could reduce it to below .5s naturally, we'd hit a new breakpoint for reducing output loss on the 80% GCD casts like most ST healing spells and the like. Add a 20% cast speed reduction, reduced by 5% per rank, to Enochian and you'd be able to weave after Fire and Thunder III, as well, not just Firestarter and Thundercloud.

[Brandedblade]

My goal with my sch wishlist is two primary things.

1. A dps rotation that gives the sch a distinct identity and goal.

2. The increase in options for generating and spending fae guage.

One thing I\\\\'ve noticed about the sch dps spells is that it has a "plague doctor" like vibe to it, between inflicting and spreading magical diseases, to burning the (now infected) foe with Broil spells. So my proposal for the dps spells is to make them more dot focused, and having the scholar rewarded for maintaining these dots.

New ability: Pandemic (Level 46, upgrade to Bane,) Ability: 12 second recast.
Deal unaspected damage with a potency of 50 to the target and all nearby enemies.
Additional Effect: Spreads the currently active Bio II, and Miasma effect from the target to all nearby enemies with duration equivalent to the current durations , damage potency reduced by 10% for the second, 20% for the third, 30% for the fourth, 40% for the 5th, and 50% for all remaining targets
Additional effect: 20% to refresh the active duration of any damage over time effects applied by this ability to the fullest.
This ability can only be cast while under the effects of Aetherflow, and consumes one stack or Aetherflow upon use.

Thoughts: Since I wanted to emphasize scholars dots, I have made a decision to remove Miasma II and give them what is essentially prenerf Bane with some minor damage potency tacked on. I personally do not like Miasma II because while effective it is a skill that is abused in an unintended way.


Meltdown: Spell. 2.5 sec cast time. 2.5 sec recast: Deals Fire aspected damage with a potency of 50 to the target and all nearby enemies. Damage potency is increased for every active scholar damage over time target on each enemy.

1. 25 potency
2. 50 potency

Thoughts: The new filler aoe dps spell for scholars. Essentially a basic 100 potency nuke if it strikes targets afflicted by your dots. The idea being that your dots being spread is not only helpful, but necessary to optimize your aoe damage. I had wanted to call it "Incinerate" but I decided to throw a bone to all the people who want Meltdown.

Trait: Fey Leeching.
Effect: If a target is afflicted by both of your Scholar Damage over time effects. They are additionally afflicted with the Fey Leeching debuff. Lasts until one or both of your damage over time effects wear off

Fey Leeching effect. Gain 5 aether in the Fairy Gauge. Effect Recast: 3 seconds
This effect cannot occur more then twice per recast window.

Thoughts: The main reward for maintaining your damage over time effects. Periodic gaining of Fairy Guage. This is meant to coincide with my proposed increased emphasis on the Fairy Guage. The twice cap is meant to be that no more then two occurrences of the debuff can trigger in one cooldown cycle. This is to compromise rewarding dot spreading without causing a mass pull to instantly fill your guage.

(Continued)