Playing SCH is so awkward and bad

[Melichoir]

Because they'd have to change ...<snip>...on top of redesigning healers.

I dont quite agree with this. IIRC outside of Succor and Adlo, healing skills on SCH are the same cost as DPS skills. And some of this is offset against fairy buffs and Aetherflow skills. If you wanted to tweak it so healers would last longer or heal more, its a matter of tweaking MP regen rates or mana costs. But adding dps skills shifts encounter designs quite a bit in of itself. Faster you kill, less of the encounter you see, less you have to heal. It gets more complicated when you have to add DPS skills to both AST and WHM to ensure they all do around the same damage output, otherwise SCH becomes a must take because the encounters are designed around damage output.

This is just a difference in outlook though. You want more Damage cause you think thatll fix the class, I personally want harder encounters overall to raise the skill floor of all players without relying on DPS checks because I dont think the class is inherently broken. It's more a matter of shifting focus away from "I need to do DPS" to "I need to resolve boss mechanics while keeping people alive." Heck, might kill two birds with one stone and get people to hush about "Healers just heal and nothing more".

Find the fights to be more or less the same since ...<snip>... press it and forget about it.

Unfortunately this is the direction most of the classes went into. Its more heres a CD, use it. Thats a problem with the xpac class wise. This would be fine if the fights were harder/more interesting overall. Simplifying a class and giving you a basic kit is fine if that kit is flexible and the fights were challenging.

I think you missed my point: for some of us...<snip>... of performance far less rewarding.

I think I get what you guys are getting at broadly, its just I feel that its a ...flawed way of looking at things? I know that comes off as condescending, but its partly the way Im seeing this. Its like arguing that when something was ultra clunky, it's still good due to how much APM or how many buttons to press. My understanding of SMN is that this is the problem - to much going on. More buttons can be interesting, but it tends to sidestep other issues such as "Is this even well designed?" What Im feeling is that this feels like the illusion of gameplay, rather than actual gameplay. Like how for a while in games everything was a QTE. Like there wasnt deep thought for on keeping straight shot buff up. Is it gonna fall off? reapply before anything else. If you can get a straighter shot crit, great. Its something to do but its not meaningful skill.

Id say that yeah, if we want to debate if things got simpler this xpac, sure. I think thats the case. I have my complaints about DRK personally, but I think the thing Im not connecting with here is simply how this is being framed. This isnt like DRK, as an example, where you had managing 2 buff windows, ontop of mana pool management that couldnt be remedied by someone elses raid buffs, oGCD usage of DA (as in where you use it in the oGCD) paired with Tank CDs and aggro management, but now its just Put on Grit, use that Standard DPS combo, and spam EoS until youre down to 3k mana, and use Delirum and Spamotard BS. The skills shifted into much less interesting versions of themselves, aggro management is now a joke, youre not really managing mana anymore, you dont really have to care about how oGCDs are used, etc. Im not seeing my blind spot on this when people are saying "Oh, we lost an oGCD that was used on CD, and a dot that was mana heavy, poor poor selene, therefore the class is substantially less interesting." What Im asking is where is the big nuances that define a substantial differences between 4.x SCH vs 5.x SCH? Cause I can do that with DRK, but Im having difficulty doing that with SCH, even after reviewing guides on SCH from 4.X, particularly since some of these nuances seemed like bad game design. Not that DA spam was good design. It certainly wasnt, but some of the things buried in there were. There was more meta thought to it. You could do more damage doing DA earlier in the GCD. Things like that.

So if there is something akin to this, then Id be interested in hearing that. But the "Well I needed to use this skill on CD, and that dot was kinda mana intensive" isnt telling me that there was much deeper things going on.