Was the new sch even play tested?

[Lagomorph]

Part 1
For weeks now there has been many people in the community who were saying that the new healers are poorly designed. Of course, the developers and some optimistic people said that we needed to test these changes before we complained about them. Well, to the surprise of absolutely no one, scholar and astrologian are terrible, broken classes right now. I've heard mixed reactions about white mages, some love the changes, and some can't get over losing aero 3. I'd probably be in the latter group if I played white mage.

Here I'm mostly going to speak about sch, because I have that class at 80 and my ast is level 74 currently.

The good things
-Summon seraph is great. It's a really strong cooldown and feels very impactful when I use it, but only because of consolation.

-Recitation is and the new crit adlo mechanics is a good compromise to what players have been asking for for a long time. It's great that we can force huge shields on a tank, but it also isn't as overpowered as being able to deploy the entire crit adlo shield would be.

-New animations on broil and biolysis look very nice.

-Enhanced sacred soil is really strong, and it feels really good to use both in dungeons and on bosses. Definitely one of the best ways to spend an aetherflow stack right now.

-Ruin 2 potency increase helps with weaving tremendously and was a much needed change.



The poor design choices
First, let me preface this party by saying that for everything I list here (aside from the bugs) I understand why the developers did what they did, but I feel it was a very poor solution to the problems they were trying to solve.

-One of the biggest issues is a bug with the new eos abilities. Sometimes if I double weave 2 eos abilities both will go on cooldown, yet eos will only execute the second one. This isn't a rare occurrence and I'm not sure what triggers it. It seems like it happens far more often in dungeons; I wasn't able to replicate this in housing areas. This bug is one reason why I question if this class was play tested at all. I noticed this problem literally minutes into the level 71 dungeon. I'm sure any one else playing the class would notice this too.

-Consolation sometimes will use both charges for one use. Same as above, I'm not quite sure how to replicate this, but this probably has something to do with mashing the button too fast and using both charges before the seraph can use the first.

-Aetherflow being locked out of combat is an awful design choice. Sometimes in dungeons I find myself stopping dps completely because I want the enemies to die slower so that I wait for the cooldown on my next aetherflow so I can use it before we start running to the next pack. Again, this is a really bad design choice that I noticed very quickly when playing the class.

[Lagomorph]

Part 2
The poor design choices continued
-We are encouraged to not waste any aetherflow stacks to build fairy gauge. We are also encouraged to use aetherflow on cooldown to help sustain our mp. On fights where there is a lot of outgoing damage, neither of these objectives conflict with each other. When outgoing damage is low, though? Sch feels like a really awful class to play in this case. Here I'm forced to either do unnecessary weaves and overheal lustrate random people to build my fairy gauge, or I can just take the loss and waste my aetherflow stacks when I use another aetherflow. This problem feels especially bad in solo play where I don't really need to use stacks at all, but I frequently run out of mp.

-Art of war costs way too much mp. I wouldn't really be complaining about this as much if the other healers didn't have 600 mp aoe abilities. On top of this, whm has other tools to sustain mp that sch does not. Really questioning the design choice behind the mp cost of this attack. If this is the cost of making this ability instant cast compared to the other healer aoe abilities, I'd much rather there was just a cast time on it.

-Manual embrace is gone. Normally this wouldn't be that big of a deal. Manual embrace in ARR, heavensward, stormblood had niche uses, but you could get away without ever really using it. Now? Well I have this seraph that casts a pretty potent heal + shield. The only problem is I can't control who that shield goes on. This would have been amazing if I could tell seraph who to use it on. I want to make sure that the shield gets used, not put on some dps who won't even take damage. Right now, summon seraph is basically a cooldown that lets me use consolation twice. Seraphic embrace usually doesn't do anything meaningful.

[Lagomorph]

Part 3
Things I would like to see changed
-We need another aetherflow spender that doesn't heal. Energy drain is what I would like back most, but I understand that SE wanted to remove the choice between using stacks for healing and using stacks for dps. Here are some ideas that I have that might fix this issue without reintroducing this decision:

-Give us energy drain, but make it an ogcd on a 20s or 30s cooldown and make it restore mp. Remove the mp restoration on aetherflow.
-Make it so that if I use aetherflow while still having stacks remaining, I'll gain fairy gauge for my unused stacks and my next aetherflow cooldown is a bit shorter.
-Aetherflow still gains only 3 stacks per use, but I can now hold 6 total.
-Give us back energy drain that still consumes an aetherflow stack. It still restores mp, but doesn't do any damage.

-Let us use aetherflow outside of combat again. I understand that you don't want people in raids waiting pre-pull for cooldowns. Wouldn't it be better to just make people respawn with full aetherflow stacks? Combat only aetherflow was one of the most terrible choices for scholars this expansion. Almost every sch that I know agrees with me.

-Help our mp situation in some way. In dungeons after I run low on my from spamming art of war, I literally just sit and do nothing if the tank doesn't need healing. This isn't fun game play. Reducing the cost on art of war is a solution, but it doesn't have to be this. I really liked the trait that occasionally gave us a free succor when we used sacred soil. Making certain actions give you a proc that makes the next art of war free would also help our mp situation tremendously.

-Bring back manual embrace targeting. A friend of mine suggested that a good way to do this would be if you hit "sic" with a player targeted, eos/seraph will spam heal that person. I wouldn't be opposed to this as an alternative to manually being able to target embrace.


Preemptive answers to potential responses:
-Your sch isn't 80?
-My main character isn't selected on my forums profile.

-This thread has been made countless times already. Why are you making one?
-Because I have faith that SE will listen to their players. The way to get them to know that players are unhappy is to make some noise. I'm just doing my part here.

-I think healers are fine, and they are perfect the way that they are.
-That's great and all if you enjoy the new healers. There is a large group, however, that doesn't enjoy them in the state that they are.

-You haven't done any of the raids yet, how do you know these problems will be present in raid?
-It doesn't matter if they are or aren't. Doing my daily expert roulette should be a fun experience too, don't you think?

-Play dps if you want to dps
-If SE wants me to heal more, then there needs to be more damage in this game.

[Sebazy]

In fairness to SE, play testing for MMOs is a bit of a catch 22.

I'd assume that SE use a similar setup to EA back towards the end of Bullfrog. The TLDR of that being that Yoshida likely gets handed a fairly random pool of play testers each development cycle with the very real risk of them having little to no prior experience of the game (something that was confirmed by Yoshida during Gordias). These people will be working hard, likely to very specific and exact quotas and demands. The nuances of balance isn't something they are looking at. They are there for the bugs, AST's play not queueing properly is one thing they should have spotted, that god awful (grouchy cat?) noise on Viera is another thing.

Balance really can only fall to the developers but given my previous thoughts on how thinly stretched the job team is, the reality is that it falls to the community. Maybe not always by our feedback here, but the server metrics we give them as we play.

[Alphras]

Good write up. Many of these points were already brought up after the media tour. So aside from the bugs they knew of the problems, they just didn't do anything. My fear is we will be stuck with this iteration of SCH for the next two years, aside from some bandaids.

[Lannybaby]

AF holding a max of 6 stacks would be too strong. If anything, it would make sense for each AF cast to restore a base amount of mp plus a bit extra for any unused AF stacks, but not holding 6 at once.

[zeopower6]

Good write up. Many of these points were already brought up after the media tour. So aside from the bugs they knew of the problems, they just didn't do anything. My fear is we will be stuck with this iteration of SCH for the next two years, aside from some bandaids.

If 4.0 was any indicator they WILL do something like the readdition of Miasma 2. Too much doom saying. They may just be waiting till like.. now to actually change stuff. Honestly there are only a few things that need to change.

My prime things:
Blessing delay away!
AOE Biolysis
Some form of Energy Drain-a-like.

That is all that needs to be done really imo to make it WOW.

Shadow Flare and that other DoT I really don't care for but everything else is MMMM.

[Ekimmak]

It feels wrong to go into a fight and not have two DoTs to apply.

[KatCnaa]

To me, the new changes feel like I'm playing WHM not SCH. I loved my party aoe cleanse. I loved the feel of sch being a preemptive healing class -- I had to understand what was coming to be a good SCH in laying down both shields and my dots. If I wanted to be a WHM I would have mained WHM.

[xXAzurePrimeXx]

There is definitely significantly more damage output in the level 80 duties