Scholar Aetherflow Issues

[Nethereal]

I’m offering my opinion on the changes, and while it comes from someone who is not a SCH main by any stretch, you are being unnecessarily hostile in this response. Please, take a few seats.

While I'm sorry you feel I'm being hostile and or condescending, your opinion is uninformed and is based on second hand information that you haven't gone through yourself(hopefully seen first hand at least) and while I focus on the class as a whole your view of it is currently on the lower levels and lacks information on the tail end of it making your argument feel genuinely dishonest. If you knew about some of the things I talked about prior and mentioned them instead of ignoring them(what I assumed because you didn't clarify) then I would have taken a different approach. Hopefully we both now understand each other's point of view.

A few things. Why is the fact they heal more than dps relevant? I would like to know what that has to do with anything. It's not like the healing requirements are the limiting factor here.

You ask that but the exact same point applies to dps. I only brought it up because you brought up dps they're just even factors they're equal but you seem to think of healing as being the side mechanic of lilies.

Also, why am I focusing on dps? Just so we're clear, Lilies are mainly a glorified swifcast timer reset you can use on cure II and medica. Nothing more. Rapture is a switfcast medica and Solace a swifcast cure II.

You're completely ignoring the fact they're resource free that fact alone already makes them incomparable to swiftcasted spells. Regardless of that misery is still only 50% of the mechanic whether you like it or not. While the other half is resource free instant healing with yes the advantage to weave.

You're still limited to the GCD so you'll need to wait to do anything. Whether you cast medica and get the heal at the end of your GCD or cast rapture and get the heal at the beginning of your GCD it's the same thing.
The real upside to this mechanic is 1) an opportunity to weave after the heal in order to keep DPS uptime 2) misery for DPS uptime 3) healing and DPS uptime during mobility
So yeah it's almost all about the DPS, without the DPS it's nothing much. Actually, without the DPS it's essentially a mobility tool (in a setting where you wouldn't want to gcd heal anyways... so yeah), and potentially a single gcd burst mechanicsm.

You clearly know that not all weaves are offensive so I don't see why you separated 1 and 3 considering they're the exact same. And again you ignore the healing because of bias and the fact it's a completely free resource. Healing in this game is predictable but even with that it still is equal to dps by definition. You're not going to be clearing any current content fights without some form of healing and vice versa. Lilies by design are supposed to represent the balance between healing and dps but you seem either unwilling or unable to see that due to your bias towards dps. Even if you combined the fact that optimization on healers is largely to increase dps up time the point still stands and you'll never get around that.

The DPS aspect of the afflatus suit is such a big component of the mechanic that if you took the healing out of it completely you would still use it! Comparatively AF would serve no purpose.

Except you're talking about an impossibility so it's irrelevant. If AF didn't heal it would do something else, like on smn. And you seem to not be able to do math either because misery requires 4 gcds before it can even be used and just some simple math you would be able to tell 4x glare is 1200 potency versus misery's 900. The purpose of misery is to refund your dps lost during healing, healing. Why do you not understand this? If you took the healing out afflatus and didn't change misery it would never be used, did you not think about this at all? Strictly speaking using misery is a dps loss the only reason misery is even used is because it heals and refunds the dps lost for doing it, why are you so biased you are unable to see this? Can you not see the balance between dps and healing from the way lilies function alone? The reason misery is a dps gain is because the time you would spend healing is recovered from the three HEALING lilies used prior to using misery.

The only common ground is that they're both healing mechanisms that are geared towards minimizing your dps loss (in whm case can even potentially increase your dps). This should come to no surprise but the reason for this is that, again, healing requirements in FF14 are pretty low.

They're both mechanics geared towards healing and minimizing your dps loss, why is it so hard for you to admit that healing and dps are just two sides of the same coin?

So yeah I'm making it a DPS conversation because it's mostly a DPS uptime tool in a game where healing kits are meant to free up DPS uptime anyways. (and it's a great tool at that, lets just call a cat a cat)

Yes lets just call a cat, a cat. So it would be amazing if you stopped your bias towards healing the only thing that could remotely justify it is that you can never have too much dps versus you can always have too much healing in terms of availability.

When in the hell was I even using math? Especially in the text you quoted. You even quoting the right person dude?

Because if you knew how to use math then you would know what you're suggesting would never even come as a thought to any rational person balancing a game that is completely based around math.

If you want your idea to be taken even a little seriously you have to at least elaborate on your idea instead of leaving it opened ended by saying stuff like

I am ok with Indom, Excog, and Sacred Soil remaining aetherflow skills, but those CDs need to be drastically reduced; then just make all the skills share the recast timer. If we were to get ED back, it would make even more sense for them to set up aetherflow this way.

If you knew the math for how these abilities work, especially sacred soil you wouldn't say any of that. Reduce the CD on sacred soil? We're already praying they don't nerf sacred soil in its current state.

[Gemina]

Because if you knew how to use math then you would know what you're suggesting would never even come as a thought to any rational person balancing a game that is completely based around math.

If you want your idea to be taken even a little seriously you have to at least elaborate on your idea instead of leaving it opened ended by saying stuff like


If you knew the math for how these abilities work, especially sacred soil you wouldn't say any of that. Reduce the CD on sacred soil? We're already praying they don't nerf sacred soil in its current state.

Oh man, really? During my time on this virtual rock, a lot of people have opened their arguments against me in some ridiculous ways, but this really does take the cake. You're telling me to elaborate on an idea instead of leaving it open-ended, yet to express this you quoted my post with a statement saying, "You literally can't use math." I honestly don't know how you could be more vague.

Ok fine. Enlighten me, Math Wizz. How good was the person at math who green-lighted buffing AST into the stratosphere in late HW into SB? Who looked at one job being able to: shield, regen, buff party speed for 30s, buff party dmg for 30s, buff party crit rate for 30s, increase raid defense, stun enemies, regen MP, extend durations on buffs, give them the best of both worlds from WHM and SCH bubbles, reduce their own cast times by 2.5 seconds, and also have an ogcd heal that gets stronger the less HP the target has, and said.... "Yup! Mathematically, healers are balanced." Enlighten me. How good are the players at math who want this ridiculously OP version of AST back?

All I am talking about is that I do not like skills using multiple resources. Aetherflow in it's current state, sucks. And if you even taken to time to read my posts instead of spouting thoughtless nonsense, you would have seen that I suggested for these skills to either have their CDs reduced, or removed as aetherflow skills. Think about it.... mathematically of course. If aetherflow was just scrapped, and these abilities just functioned as is outside of needing stacks (SS on 30s CD, Indom on 30s CD, Excog on 45s CD), would it really be all that different?

Also, get out of here with requiring high math skills to make suggestions on the forums. Good grief.

[Nethereal]

Oh man, really? During my time on this virtual rock, a lot of people have opened their arguments against me in some ridiculous ways, but this really does take the cake. You're telling me to elaborate on an idea instead of leaving it open-ended, yet to express this you quoted my post with a statement saying, "You literally can't use math." I honestly don't know how you could be more vague.

Ok fine. Enlighten me, Math Wizz. How good was the person at math who green-lighted buffing AST into the stratosphere in late HW into SB? Who looked at one job being able to: shield, regen, buff party speed for 30s, buff party dmg for 30s, buff party crit rate for 30s, increase raid defense, stun enemies, regen MP, extend durations on buffs, give them the best of both worlds from WHM and SCH bubbles, reduce their own cast times by 2.5 seconds, and also have an ogcd heal that gets stronger the less HP the target has, and said.... "Yup! Mathematically, healers are balanced." Enlighten me. How good are the players at math who want this ridiculously OP version of AST back?

All I am talking about is that I do not like skills using multiple resources. Aetherflow in it's current state, sucks. And if you even taken to time to read my posts instead of spouting thoughtless nonsense, you would have seen that I suggested for these skills to either have their CDs reduced, or removed as aetherflow skills. Think about it.... mathematically of course. If aetherflow was just scrapped, and these abilities just functioned as is outside of needing stacks (SS on 30s CD, Indom on 30s CD, Excog on 45s CD), would it really be all that different?

Also, get out of here with requiring high math skills to make suggestions on the forums. Good grief.

It doesn't take high math skills to make suggestions on the forums. It only takes a middle schooler with a calculator and someone who's willing to actually listen to themselves before they type something out. If you wish to clarify your points you should've done so in your original post, my previous response was a direct quote from yours. And yes it would be different, it would be broken in fact and they would have to nerf the potentiates into the ground. I can't tell if you're serious or not about making every aetherflow ability unconstrained to 3 uses every 60 seconds or if you just actually don't play this game. Also CDs are not a resource, they only use 1 resource, Aetherflow. As for the rest of your post I don't see how that relates to me at all, there are a lot of people who can't do simple math not because it's hard but because they don't bother to think about it.

Also it seems kind of ironic to talk about Ast considering what they've done to it this patch, they obviously weren't happy with it and thought about it more. You should probably do the same.

[Gemina]

It doesn't take high math skills to make suggestions on the forums. It only takes a middle schooler with a calculator and someone who's willing to actually listen to themselves before they type something out. If you wish to clarify your points you should've done so in your original post, my previous response was a direct quote from yours. And yes it would be different, it would be broken in fact and they would have to nerf the potentiates into the ground. I can't tell if you're serious or not about making every aetherflow ability unconstrained to 3 uses every 60 seconds or if you just actually don't play this game. Also CDs are not a resource, they only use 1 resource, Aetherflow. As for the rest of your post I don't see how that relates to me at all, there are a lot of people who can't do simple math not because it's hard but because they don't bother to think about it.

Also it seems kind of ironic to talk about Ast considering what they've done to it this patch, they obviously weren't happy with it and thought about it more. You should probably do the same.

It also doesn't take high math skills to know how to have a constructive conversation either. It does take some literary comprehension though. You're not providing anything other than a offensive opposition, but I'll be sure to have a calculator handy whenever you're around. How about that?

And no, I was never serious about unconstrained aetherflow usage. If you knew how to read you would know my issue is with aetherflow, not its abilities. Also, CDs use the resource of time. No matter how you choose to perform your mental gymnastics, the abilities are still restricted not by one gate, but two, and that is what I have an issue with.

Anything else you would like to instruct me on today senpai?

[HyoMinPark]

While I'm sorry you feel I'm being hostile and or condescending, your opinion is uninformed and is based on second hand information that you haven't gone through yourself(hopefully seen first hand at least) and while I focus on the class as a whole your view of it is currently on the lower levels and lacks information on the tail end of it making your argument feel genuinely dishonest. If you knew about some of the things I talked about prior and mentioned them instead of ignoring them(what I assumed because you didn't clarify) then I would have taken a different approach. Hopefully we both now understand each other's point of view.

Career SCHs better than you and I have similar complaints to what I have expressed in this thread: they don't like Aetherflow being locked to combat, nor do they like not having a way to dump excess stacks that doesn't involve blatant overhealing. They also don't like overcapping because that's ultimately a waste of resources. It's Resource Management 101. That's the biggest two complaints I have about SCH currently.

Even with only being level 73. I’ve already listed the reasons why I find the Aetherflow lock strange; I won’t list them again. And I’m not one that enjoys wasting resources, so having nothing to get rid of unused stacks is particularly grating for me—and this becomes particularly egregious when synced down, which means it’s probably roughly the same for any SCH leveling from 30 to 80 (that cares to properly manage their Aetherflow—let me clarify that). I’d have to relevel the job on another character to see if that’s truly the case, but that’s what I think currently. They’ve also said that they disliked leveling SCH, which I can kind of see why when you get so used to things like out-of-combat Aetherflow and having to adjust to that change.

I wouldn’t call level 73 “low level”—the only “low level” comment I made still applies to the level I’m at now: I’m finding myself without things to spend Aetherflow on (usually during single-target) to the point where I overheal randomly to get rid of excess stacks or drop Sacred Soil again because “why not it’s time to refresh Aetherflow”.

My viewpoint may be from leveling—and it may be from an average SCH’s viewpoint—but I fail to see how that makes it "intellectually dishonest". I believe the word/phrase you're looking for it "uninformed" or perhaps "ill-informed due to not having the whole picture". And, as I said, maybe my opinion will change when I reach level 80. But you neglected that part of my reply. As it stands now, I’m definitely not finding the leveling experience smooth for me. Not when compared to WHM, which was the last healer I leveled. At least leveling SCH feels better than when I leveled AST, which was a god-honest nightmare.

Again, pardon me for not including skills I don't yet have available to me in my post, and pardon if I was not clear that I was still leveling (though a quick Lodestone search would have shown I wasn't level 80 yet). I didn't mention them because I have no experience with them, and I'm not sure how the SCH experience will be with them. I can only hope it gets better - which, people have said to me that it does (from this thread and from others), so hopefully my own experience will improve. That's the part that seems to have upset you the most about my personal, honest, if not entirely informed from a level 80 perspective, viewpoint of SCH and I can't understand why that is. I already mentioned that I've heard it gets better, but that some of the complaints I have posited here remain. I don't think you saw that any time that I mentioned it.

[EaMett]

You ask that but the exact same point applies to dps. I only brought it up because you brought up dps they're just even factors they're equal but you seem to think of healing as being the side mechanic of lilies.

Ok lets get this out of the way. Healing is capped by keeping people alive. The less healing you can do while keeping everyone alive, the better. This is because anything more than this is essentially unnecessary. DPS on the other hand is not capped, and the more dps you provide the faster things die the less you need to heal the less likely you are to hit enrage. It also helps with un-healable mistakes people may make (like OS missed mechanics) by providing backup dps they should be making.
Moving on.

You're completely ignoring the fact they're resource free that fact alone already makes them incomparable to swiftcasted spells. Regardless of that misery is still only 50% of the mechanic whether you like it or not. While the other half is resource free instant healing with yes the advantage to weave.

Currently completely irrelevant. Mana was never an issue for WHM and although it was one for SCH in dungeons the recent AoW change was enough to highly minimize this. SCH has no mana issues in other content though... Not even close to needing more than 20% of our mana. It's also a difficult comparison because SCH was built around the concept of not being able to do much without stacks whereas WHM is perfectly viable in all departments without lilies.

You clearly know that not all weaves are offensive so I don't see why you separated 1 and 3 considering they're the exact same. And again you ignore the healing because of bias and the fact it's a completely free resource. Healing in this game is predictable but even with that it still is equal to dps by definition. You're not going to be clearing any current content fights without some form of healing and vice versa. Lilies by design are supposed to represent the balance between healing and dps but you seem either unwilling or unable to see that due to your bias towards dps. Even if you combined the fact that optimization on healers is largely to increase dps up time the point still stands and you'll never get around that.

I think the issue lies here, I'll go more in detail in the next quote but if you can't separate 1 and 3 then it is either a communication issue on my end or a lack of understanding on yours. 1 never even makes a distinction between healing and dps OGCDs because it's all the same.
OGCDs are a dps loss by nature (kinda). The basic use of an OGCD is by clipping your GCD. Because they have an animation time it offsets your next GCD cast and delays your damage. This creates a dps loss. Weaving an OGCD into another instant skill with appropriate levels of damage (bold for emphasis) is therefore a dps gain compared to glare + clip because you have no loss from the animation (it fits in the gcd window)

This is completely different from 3 which is a mention that it is possible to execute your job (healing AND DPS when talking about afflatus) while moving. They're two very separate things.

Except you're talking about an impossibility so it's irrelevant. If AF didn't heal it would do something else, like on smn. And you seem to not be able to do math either because misery requires 4 gcds before it can even be used and just some simple math you would be able to tell 4x glare is 1200 potency versus misery's 900. The purpose of misery is to refund your dps lost during healing, healing. Why do you not understand this? If you took the healing out afflatus and didn't change misery it would never be used, did you not think about this at all? Strictly speaking using misery is a dps loss the only reason misery is even used is because it heals and refunds the dps lost for doing it, why are you so biased you are unable to see this? Can you not see the balance between dps and healing from the way lilies function alone? The reason misery is a dps gain is because the time you would spend healing is recovered from the three HEALING lilies used prior to using misery.

AF used to do something else and we wouldn't be having this conversation if it still did.

This is where your math falls short. Misery is 900 pot, Glare is 300 pot. Because you need 4 GCDs for misery that's 225 pot per afflatus GCD.
Now when it comes to OGCDs, lets consider a standard .8s animation time. You have bene, tetra, assize, asylum. Assize should be used on cooldown. And never delayed more than 10s if even that. Depending on your healer comp asylum and tetra should also be used pretty close to their cooldown times.

With that in mind we can already say that even if you 100% overheal your afflatus skills, when mobile and unable to cast anything else, it's your most potent DPS skill. If you're running around not being able to cast (titan car mode in eden)? Just spam your afflatus rapture or solace, that's as if you were a SCH casting Ruin II.

Now, what if you're stationary and can cast glare? If you clip your glare to use your ogcds (Lets say you only need to use one ogcd). That's 300 potency over the span of 3.3 s (2.5 gcd and .8 clip animation). That's 300/3.3 = 90 potency per second. Compare that to an afflatus skill + clip where the clip animation fits within the gcd: 225/2.5 = 90 potency per second. You're falling exactly even. This can turn into a DPS gain if you have a relatively high ping, if you cast Misery on more than one target (which btw would be so massive it would be a dps gain over just glare with no clips) or if you cast misery during a buff window.

What if you need to use two ogcds (assize and tetra for example)? That would be glare + 2 clip > 300/4.1 = 73 potency per second vs 225/2.5 = 90 potency per second. It's a dps gain by a significant margin.
The rule here is that you should always cast afflatus skills before your ogcds, in the worst case scenario it's just the same as clipping but in many others it's a dps gain.

And this is without even looking at the healing component. Hence why I said you would still use this suit of skills even if they didn't heal. You would just use them as a better version of SCH Ruin II. But the gameplay would be essentially the same.

If you are stationary and have nothing to weave you'd have absolutely no reason to use afflatus if it weren't for misery.

Afflatus is a DPS uptime tool, that's all it is. The fact that it heals just means it's easier to use, but the healing is secondary to the DPS component. As I've explained before, it's made obvious from the fact that removing misery would be more detrimental than removing the healing.