To healers enjoying 5.0: a gil for your thoughts?

[Mikaeus_The_Lunarch]

What does this mean? Stack how exactly? Can someone give an example?

im assuming they mean that you can be affected by a card AND divination?

[Sanghelios]

Yea, a card and divination stacks. Although cards wont stack on another card. They will just replace the old one.

[Brandedblade]

Lynesse has said it better then I could ever have. The rhythm and flow of scholar feels the same to me. The only thing that to me truly feels like a loss is ED.

That being said, I'm actually dreading it being returned to the game because of its damage. I do agree we need a dump skill for excess aetherflow. I just don't want it to do damage because then we would have the issue of people applying the damage potency as a cost when optimizing their healing for a fight instead.

If we absolutely, positively, had to have a damage Aetherflow skill, I'd say make it Shadow Flare, nerf its potency and make it a 30 second cooldown. But otherwise I'd prefer a skill that just gave you mp and more fae guage for future set up.

[Fiorinol]

I think the uptime on healers being the In-Demand role in DF speaks for itself, and I'd wager that some adjustments are incoming. I've seen a number of detailed responses explaining what people dislike and wish to change, but (from briefly skimming) I've mostly seen one-sentence responses in favor of the changes. I don't see a lot of discussion about the exact details of positives to our changes (SCH and AST in particular), just broad general opinions. I'm personally in the camp of feeling like my main job just dumped me and doesn't want me to play it anymore due to these changes, but I don't want to demand changes that make people who ARE enjoying the healer jobs to feel this way either. To that end, I want to ask people who're enjoying healing in 5.0 to give us the precise details, so that the rebalance of this rebalance gets better for everyone. So, those of you who are enjoying 5.0 healer jobs... What're the details that you most like and why?

Too early to say. Almost every tank I ran into in my roulettes was a gunbreaker.

[LeonTrifang]

I suppose I am in a vocal minority of SCH that my dps was always secondary to me. More than once I main healed while my co-healer dps'ed. I did it mind you but never made it more important than keeping people on their feet. That said I think one of the features that I miss is having an aetherflow spender that didn't feel like wasting my stats to give me back mana. Mind you, I don't care if I get ED back but it is a perfect example of a skill that can be used to use of aetherflow without feeling like it was wasted. Honestly, even if they made it a mana siphon with low cooldown that did no damage I would take it. The only other thing I really miss is the trait that lowered the cooldown on atherflow. It was rewarding to time getting the best use out of my stacks. Did I use them for ogcd heals or save it for energy siphons toward the end. My sch is only 73 at the time of this post so I will see how I feel when I get to 80.

Also, just to get this out there. With people complaining about the atherflow in battle just hit your tank with adlo or heck ruin II a random mob. Aggro management is so dummy easy for tanks right now running and aoe attack will keep all the aggro off you. Plus it puts you in battle to pop your aetherflow to use excog and such.

What I enjoy now:
Healing in higher dungeons feels impactful.
Embrace on instant cast so I dont have to set her as much. (Still do for bosses for that sweet regen)


What I dont enjoy:
Lower dungeons were as easy as ever. To be fair, most lower dungeons have always been easy as sch so nothing really changed. X3
MP management can be tough sometimes on bigger pulls. (Generally alternating atherflow and lucid should be enough but can feel real rough when trying to add in aoe damage)

Okay! So first of all, your kitty is adorable! Second, I agree. Healing is most important to me, DPS is downtime, and downtime only. Our job is to heal, not kill. I DPS whenever I am able, but healing is my main focus.

[Jerichai]

We used Miasma II to weave, not Ruin II. So no, it didn't work the same.

Miasma II was clunky and tacked on -- literally tacked on, in fact -- and it forced the player to reposition when they needed to use it, which was awkward when you were dodging mechanics, and only acceptable when something was on farm..

Ruin II was there for double weaving and situations where you wanted to weave but couldn't be in range of the boss for some reason. It's literally another point of optimization that rewards good knowledge of the fight and ability usage.

Nor was it really required to use Miasma II if you didn't want to in a vast majority of content. That's what annoys me with this whole situation. Prior to ShB, if a SCH wanted to stand around and be a "pure healer", they could do so in most content. If they wanted an easy DPS rotation...they could brainlessly spam broil to their heart's content. That people are cheering the collapse of the ceiling that they were never really required to chase is frankly absurd.

[Truck]

If you wanna pressure healers into being a more heal focused class simply make the enemies hit harder. Dont gut the abilities that made enemies die faster.

[Gravagar]

-snip-
Miasma II was clunky and tacked on -- literally tacked on, in fact -- and it forced the player to reposition when they needed to use it, which was awkward when you were dodging mechanics, and only acceptable when something was on farm.

To me, Miasma 2 was by far one of the most interesting abilities with the most depth in SB1 scholar's kit, and saved the whole job for me after I had turned to Noct AST for 4.0~4.15.


Initially, I thought it was a strange, clunky addition, but it proved me wrong and won me over quickly. It was a swiss army knife that gave you a large number of tools that challenged you to use them in creative ways, ways that 4.0 SCH struggled to deal with before it was added. Weaving was just one use- it felt terrible to use Broil on packs of 5+ mobs just because you lacked any sort of proper AOE. You mentioned the DoT made it feel clunky, but I considered it to be an interesting limitation to its single target potential that gave a use-case for Ruin 2 for weaving if it was within that 18 second DoT window. I felt brought more than it took away.


I was actually really surprised how a single "tacked on" ability enhanced my experience so drastically, it gave me high hopes for SB2 scholar (which were not met) and keeps me expecting something good from the hopeful rebalance-rebalance.


Though, do keep in mind that my point of view is that, while I respect and understand the decision to shift to a "pure healer" focus, it doesn't change the fact that dealing damage IS a healer responsibility (because killing enemies inflicts a "debuff" that reduces their damage to zero, thus accomplishing our job perfectly.) Also, that just because most healers became more "pure", that doesn't mean they ALL needed to, and SCH was the ideal (missed) opportunity to let us <s> filthy impure healers </s> have just ONE job.


Edit: The thing I agree with is making entry-level damage dealing for new healers more approachable and less intimidating. The major point I disagree with is doing so at the expense of experienced healers that were used to more depth.

[Natorei]

I too was the one in my team that did most of the heavy lifting healing-wise, as a SCH main-- and this update still makes the job feel incoherent to me. Before this, you earned your Energy Drain dps by shielding to the point that you didn't need to use those Aetherflows on healing, and in turn you were rewarded with the MP needed to keep using high-cost shields. Now, since you can only use Aetherflows on healing, shield-reliant styles have been doubly undermined-- not only are you no longer rewarded for investing mp in shields, you are arguably punished by shielding in that you have less healing to do, meaning less Aetherflow usage, meaning less MP than ever before. Either you throw away stacks or use them pointlessly to keep Aetherflow on cooldown, or you use them when they're needed and run out of MP while Aetherflow sits unused.

Understanding that not every SCH plays the same way, I feel like this update has functionally eliminated the option to play a shield-heavy SCH, despite shields being one of the trademarks of the job. Without the Shield + Energy Drain investment-reward combination, SCH has lost an important dynamic that made it enjoyable to play. Reintroducing Energy Drain, even as just an MP restorer and not a damaging move, would make a shield-heavy playstyle possible again, and would make Aetherflow management actually feel like management again.

[Lynesse]

Snip..

You're right in theory. Ruin II should have been used like that, but in practice it was almost never needed. If that were the only issue, we wouldn't be having this discussion, but SCH had some (in my opinion, several) QoL problems that needed addressing.

Snip.

I don't know what to say to this. It feels like you're putting words in my mouth. I mean, to me it was just a DoT with an ugly animation that cost a lot of MP.

This isn't the place to argue this, though. Someone asked for my opinion -- as someone who enjoys it currently -- and I gave it. Really, there's very little substance to these arguments, anyway.