Disrespectful and Dismissive.

[Wawachume]

Also, Selene... WHY HAVE AN EXTRA FAERIE IF SHE DOESN'T BRING ANYTHING UNIQUE TO THE TABLE?

Yeah, if they were going to homogenize Eos and Selene, I'd have rather they just went all the way and had one fairy named Lily.

Or changed their names to Rod and Arlene like my phone's autocorrect wants. That could be fun too.

[Punslinger]

From the outside, it looks like absolutely no effort or care went into healer design. It looks like someone said "what's the cheapest, lowest-effort solution for healers? Let's do that thing so we can get back to making sure SAM has an engaging experience."

I see all the quality practically everywhere in this game, and then over in the corner, there's the healers.

Random Dev: "Sir, NIN's DPS is a little lower than it should be."

Yoshi-P: "Red Alert! Immediately form a committee to address this problem by patch 5.1!"

Random Dev: "Sir, WAR's Fell Cleave is awesome, but it could be even awesomer."

Yoshi-P: "Yellow Alert! Tell the committee to make WAR better once they're done with NIN!"

Random Dev: "Sir, healer numbers are way down, queues are locked on Adventurer In Need: Healer, and AST mains have fled to the wastelands to fight over scraps of food in the post-apocalyptic hellscape they now inhabit."

Yoshi-P: "Meh, have Bob from Accounting tweak the potency numbers a little. I've got a BLM to gear up."

[Almostward]

That's how it feels with healer at the moment. They tell dps not to worry that Ninja is coming soon, and they are working very hard on it.

They tell tanks to not worry Warrior is getting touched up after ninja so not to worry.

For healer they just shrug and tell us it's fine, and no adjustments are coming......but they appreciate our feeback.

[Hatstand]

That's how it feels with healer at the moment. They tell dps not to worry that Ninja is coming soon, and they are working very hard on it.

They tell tanks to not worry Warrior is getting touched up after ninja so not to worry.

For healer they just shrug and tell us it's fine, and no adjustments are coming......but they appreciate our feeback.

They don’t even say that they appreciate our feedback. They say they made the AST change because of feedback, but they don’t actually say they appreciate more feedback on AST in particular or healers I’m general. Unlike bard, who was also told they wouldn’t be getting immediate adjustment but who were asked for feedback.

[Lagomorph]

No, you're not supposed to ignore the first part. You are supposed to look and read what it is reply to. It is in reply to your post containing: "There is no reason that these abilities couldn't have been removed only when their suitable replacements were ready."

The reason is that "given their track record, deleting and replacing with new skills is not something they're going to do outside of a rework", to quote myself. That is the purpose of that statement. Then the second part references the live letter, because if they're willing to do it with Ninja, they just might be willing to do it with Scholar.

Here you are acknowledging the issue with your post while simultaneously pretending it isn't a problem at all. When I see you say that their track record shows something, and I disagree, I'm going to say why I disagree. If you want part of your post to not be responded to (which by the way is to be ignored, is it not?) then either don't include it or say that it isn't part of your main point. It is not my responsibility to make guesses on what part you want responses to and what part you do not want responses to.

The consistent problem is that you're isolating statements that make it easy for you to respond to in a vacuum and conveniently ignoring everything that was said in the overall conversation.

I'm pretty sure that I've been good about responding to everything you said. Rarely have I ever omitted anything. Do you want me to break your posts down sentence by sentence to tell you you're wrong in that manner instead? That can be done. By the way, I noticed that you ignore things out of convenience too, if that's what we're going to call it. Want me to bring up the things that I've said that you conveniently chose not to reply to?

And my reply to that was "Because SE has quite obviously stated through action that healers will not get many DPS buttons. So if we do get any DPS actions, I think we all want them to be more interesting than Miasma or Shadowflare. Ideally, involving the fairy gauge."

It is not a statement based on fact, but on observation, as I've clarified multiple times. Unless of course you take that statement in a vacuum.

You can't just insert yourself in the middle of a conversation ignore what was said beforehand or even in reply to yourself. Here you are, several pages later, still trying to convince me it's a statement of fact.


And this is my last response regarding these two things above. I refuse to waste more time repeating myself because you've shown me that you will continue to focus on as single statement and ignore the entire context around it.

I quoted those because you asked "What is the most crucial point I am making?" I would not have quoted either if you had not asked. You revised and clarified the statement, but did not change the nature of the statement until now, which I will address below. In fact, I don’t believe I said anything about fact vs assumption in my last post, and I’m not sure how you’ve deluded yourself into thinking that was what I’m still talking about.

6.0 is not something I ever said, but something you inserted on your own. I did not say "near future" so I guess that would be a legit complaint, but I thought it would be clear enough from the context of other things I've said (e.g. 5.1 changes, Player feedback - which does not really exist between expansions. They have their design, then feedback comes after).

And here is where the disconnect lies. You made it clear nowhere in your post that you wanted these new abilities before 6.0. You can say "would preclude the existence of anything better than that in the future" or "it is extremely unlikely that they will give us anything better in the future" and neither give me any indication that 6.0 wasn't a part of that future. Again here I'm going to say that you meant slightly different from what you had been saying. I appreciate the clarification though, even if it came this late. I assumed 6.0 because you were talking about completely new abilities. If I had known you meant otherwise earlier, I probably would have responded very differently initially. Since you use past behavior as an indicator of what will happen in the future, let's do this here too. How often have new abilities been added to an existing class outside of an expansion being released? Literally never. Maybe you think this is about to happen to ninja. I highly doubt it. Its seems a lot more likely that mudras will change in some way in their interaction with gcds and the effects of two of their three combos may be consolidated into one skill.

The two scenarios are:
1. Scholar gets Bane, Shadowflare, Miasma back in the near future.
2. Scholar gets new abilities in the near future.

These are the two I think are mutually exclusive, because SE does not want us to have many damaging abilities. Given the trend of removing damaging abilities one after the other, I do not think there's any chance of getting them both.

Alright let's go with your revision on the future only referring to the near future. If you're talking about the near future, then I'll point back to what I said above. It's probably not going to happen. It would be nice if it did, but I highly doubt that anything on that scale is something SE would do. Now I have a choice between asking for what I think is more likely, or what I think is more favorable but extremely unlikely. I think I'll go with the former. If there were any indication that scenario 2 had above abysmal odds of becoming true this expansion, then I would be right there with you asking for a damage dealing fairy gauge spender.

As for 6.0, they very well could be doing (1) in 5.X and then reverting (1) in order to do (2) in 6.0. I think this is also very unlikely, because if SCH gets old stuff back they will have to address the other healers as well and start a new round of balancing. They've managed to balance the healers well in 5.05 because these abilities are gone.

The most important thing, which was in my original post talking about SCH abilities is this:
What I don't want is for them to think we want (1) and decide to not give us (2).
Even if no changes are coming in 5.X, I want them to know that we want something more interesting than (1).

This is just a matter of guesswork for both of us. Maybe you have more faith in SE than I do, but I don't think that 2 will happen, which is why I want old skills back. There isn't really much more to it than that. If you think SE is capable and willing to add a completely new ability in the middle of the expansion, then I wish that I could share in your optimism.

Yes. What I think they have a problem with is sacrificing healing in favor of DPS (Energy Drain being one of the biggest offenders). I don't think they can fix this because it's the nature of optimization.

No argument from me here, I 100% agree with this. This is why I accuse the devs at SE of being clueless. Not wanting healers to sacrifice healing for damage is a clear indication to me that they have no idea how healing in this game works. It happens whether or not energy drain exists in the game or not, just in a less direct fashion.

I can see them not valuing every piece of feedback, but I'm pretty sure they consider all of it. Energy Drain and MP reduction on AoW were one of the most requested, but that's not immediately obvious by looking at just a few posts.

This is not a community-developed game. It's a Square Enix developed game. I think expecting them to address every single feedback is unreasonable and I don't expect them to implement feedback that conflicts with their planned design/vision.

Yes, the things that players want aren't always what is most healthy for the game. You can see this clearly when there is a 20+ page thread here somewhere started by a guy who says that white mage doesn't do damage and needs buffs. That's fine. I would be a lot less upset with the devs if they said something along the lines of "we acknowledge that you want ___ back, we considered it but we can't do it because of ___." If they did this instead of just ignoring healers, it would make it seem like they at least know people are unhappy and give us more hope that they're trying to fix things. Right now it seems to me like they're just pretending that healers are perfect the way they are. I don't expect them to address all feedback. I think it's reasonable to expect them to address some feedback, even if it means saying that they hear us but can't do what we're asking for various reasons. I also want them to know that their vision for healers isn't very popular, and I'd like them to at least acknowledge that they're forcing an unpopular vision on the players and explain why they feel it is necessary for the game. I don't feel like I'm asking too much here.

Yeah, it's easy to balance SCH with SCH. It's not so easy to balance SCH with AST with WHM. If you think it's that simple, then please take 4.55 healers and tell us what easy changes need to be made to balance them.

I'm just going to outright say this is wrong. It is far from difficult to keep a class's overall damage output the same while changing the rotation. The only number that really matter in terms of balance would be the classes total damage output. You can give more dots and ogcds to sch, and as long as their potency per minute is roughly 7360 then nothing has changed. Now, you can make up an extreme case and say that if broil and bio were replaced with a single dot that lasted 60 seconds and had a potency of 368 it would be overpowered even though it's still 7360 potency per minute. I don't think anyone is asking for that though. The only time balance becomes difficult is when you consider a players contribution to be the sum of their personal damage and their raid contribution through buffs. Everything I’ve said here applies to all healers, not just sch. Though I will say that SE has managed screw up something very similar to this with monk. That is a tangent that I don't feel like going on right now, though.

[KanameYuuki]

What I gather from all of this too is that they won't even look at Noct AST now that there was that Solo Heal.

[Ayesafaile]

Noct AST has always been in that awkward spot where they seemed to want to make it viable to play (buffing potencies numerous times throughout HW), but when it actually saw some play at the start of Stormblood they knee-jerk buffed SCH to make sure there was no competition again.

I remain skeptical that the re-introduction of Energy Drain and the change to Sleeve Draw in 5.05 had anything to do with listening to player feedback, but were instead just the logical fixes to the broken, incoherent and clunky job kits released with 5.0. Getting Energy Drain back changes very little for SCH other than reopening avenues for greedy play. Without Quickened Aetherflow and with pretty much just Ruin II as your weaving option, Energy Drain feels rather underwhelming.

EDIT: I am amused by the Savage solo heal videos that have been posted because they're done in full crafted gear - in an expansion where members of the community thought they'd be making healing more difficult. Oops.

[Brandedblade]

Noct AST has always been in that awkward spot where they seemed to want to make it viable to play (buffing potencies numerous times throughout HW), but when it actually saw some play at the start of Stormblood they knee-jerk buffed SCH to make sure there was no competition again.

I remain skeptical that the re-introduction of Energy Drain and the change to Sleeve Draw in 5.05 had anything to do with listening to player feedback, but were instead just the logical fixes to the broken, incoherent and clunky job kits released with 5.0. Getting Energy Drain back changes very little for SCH other than reopening avenues for greedy play. Without Quickened Aetherflow and with pretty much just Ruin II as your weaving option, Energy Drain feels rather underwhelming.

EDIT: I am amused by the Savage solo heal videos that have been posted because they're done in full crafted gear - in an expansion where members of the community thought they'd be making healing more difficult. Oops.

The point of Energy Drain is to give us a dump skill for excess Aetherflow and/or an optimization tool for people who care about that kind of stuff, theres nothing wrong with it being underwhelming when its point was more to fix a gap in the toolkit then anything else. Sleeve Draw makes the AST opener far less clunky, which is honestly the only part of the AST rotation that felt that way to me. And now that Lightspeed is pernament 90 seconds, you can have both up and utilize them to their fullest.