Healing is now a state of permanent hatred.

[Saefinn]

I mean, some people love the old cards but personally I didn't find them interesting. It was just a bunch of unwanted clutter. The most common thing to do with the old card system was fish for a aoe balance. Like it or not but people like to do more damage. I never heard a tank say "sweet bole on that tank buster it saved me" or "Wow that aoe bole saved us from that raid-wide dmg". People parse, people like damage, people want to do more damage. With the new card system I can give everyone the dmg they want while also increasing that damage again with divination. I don't have to stress about rng never giving me and balance and having to settle for something lesser like aoe spear.

Just to recap on old cards
Ewer - Gave mana regen (Never used, Lucid Dreaming and mana pots are cool)
Bole - Damage Reduction (Cute, but tanks have CD's )
Spear - Increase Crit hit rate (Not bad but one-up'd by balance)
Arrow - Increase attack speed (Other then giving it to BLM with 150% potency, poop)
Spire - TP regen (.. lol )
Balnce - Damage Increase (everyone wants it)

Again, it all comes down to personal preference but for me this is funnier and less of a headache to deal with in savages and TEA. I just personally like not having to wait 5 mins between pulls fishing for that AOE balance for openers.

How would you feel about a system closer to cards in FFXI? I get the problem where some cards are more situational and it's by chance you've got them when they are useful, to me I boiled down to The Arrow or The Balance and how I Royal Roaded.

In the version of the system I'm referring you choose which buff you use instead and the RNG chooses how effective it is based on principles similar to the game of black jack (pull another card to try and better you outcome but risk busting it).

I think people liked the element of choice and RNG rolled into one tactfully playing their cards based on their choices. But it was not without its problems. To me the FFX COR version addresses all these. But I wonder if its something people who have a longer history with AST than I do would find that more interesting

[Kummies]

How would you feel about a system closer to cards in FFXI? I get the problem where some cards are more situational and it's by chance you've got them when they are useful, to me I boiled down to The Arrow or The Balance and how I Royal Roaded.

In the version of the system I'm referring you choose which buff you use instead and the RNG chooses how effective it is based on principles similar to the game of black jack (pull another card to try and better you outcome but risk busting it).

I think people liked the element of choice and RNG rolled into one tactfully playing their cards based on their choices. But it was not without its problems. To me the FFX COR version addresses all these. But I wonder if its something people who have a longer history with AST than I do would find that more interesting

I think that system sounds interesting. I'm all for changing things up, and if the cards get another rework come 6.0 then I'll really be interested in seeing something like that in place. I like that RNG is a factor in AST identity I just didnt care for how much RNG was in SB AST if that makes sense.

[Brandedblade]

I love that you have an opinion, it's wrong, but its nice.

It doesnt even remotely play how it use to.

There's no dual casting your and fairies ability at the same time, no bane, no slow, no malady, no glorious burst AoE with DoT.

Without Quickened Aetherflow, Dissipate had gone right back to being what it used to be, pointless and counter productive other than pushing extra dps.

I'm sorry, I dont like to sound mean, but I just had to put my two cents in there my dude.

I love that you disagree, it's wrong but it's nice.

Just because the dps is simplified does not mean the healing aspect is fundamentally the same. It's still has a heavy emphasis on using cooldown and resource management via your faerie and aetherflow stacks. It still emphasizes damage mitigation over raw potency on your gcd healing. It still has the loop of feeding your aetherflow into fae guage for healing later.

If anything the loss of extreme micromanagement and Quickened Aetherflow was a necessary evil to bring sch back down to a reasonable level. What made it so powerful in previous expansions was the sheer amount of healing it could generate without loosing damage.

While forcing ogcd slots to command your fairy can feel clunky at times, it also takes away that raw power scholar had, it forces scholar take a damage penalty for accessing it's free ogcd healing. (Before you bring up "But AST" Ast is balanced around the fact its damage numbers are lower and that it has damage buffs it needs to juggle to make up the difference) As for Quickened Aetherflow, yeah I do miss it sometimes. But it was too powerful. It more or trivialized the use of Aetherflow by how much more frequently it gave you access to Aetherflow. As fun as it was, it ultimately took away from the intended drawback of Aetherflow, the restrictive number of uses per minute. I find that Recitation is a much more interesting tool for managing Aetherflow due to its sheer versatility in this regard.

[KDSilver]

If anything the loss of extreme micromanagement and Quickened Aetherflow was a necessary evil to bring sch back down to a reasonable level. What made it so powerful in previous expansions was the sheer amount of healing it could generate without loosing damage.

In ShB, he gained
- Strong regen on soil, making it both mitigating and restoring health
- Forced crit on whatever you like, especially excog/indom
- Seraph with 2 charges of aoe shield and the fairy casting stronger version of embrace with shields
- Fey blessing, basically aoe heal

And you say that that what made it powerful is its healing output without loosing damage..?
It's mostly the same from this point. Scholar became a more oGCD powerhouse.

As scholar, you'd always have to weave those abilites in someway, the tradeoff being a slight loose due to clipping with broil or weaving with miasma II or currently Ruin II.
If anything, scholar from a healing perspective became more powerful with minimal lose. You can now even run all around the arena and still do damage to a correct degree (200 is way better than 100 or 80 like in HW/SB)

Gutting the "extreme micromanagement" was not necessary for that.

[Crushnight]

snip snip

Opinions are opinions, glad you like the new card system, but I don't and I will voice my dissatisfaction of it until media tour info release of 6.0 where the devs will have cemented how they plan to continue Ast and healers going forward, if more of the same meh beast tribes to level them and never touching healers for content again.

Right now the current cards feel like unnecessary clutter, old card system if you remove rng and make them all ogcds you'd need to have 8 buttons, do it for new card system and you have 3 buttons, seals and melee/ranged split are pointlessly tacked on to try and keep all 6 cards relevant to warrant space whereas before it was the individual card effect trying to make it relevant(some succeeded balance/spear, some meh Bole/Arrow/Ewer/Lord/Lady, 1 failed Spire and it only failed due to what the devs did to tp from HW -> SB).

Ast is wanting another mp restoration in its kit, multiple deaths in non savage/ultimate content, you feel the burn of mp far more than sch/whm, the loss of Ewer can be felt but given the sweeping of outside mp regeneration it had to be changed.
5.0 ast would've killed to have Bole for dungeons with their inherently weaker healing kit, now with healing back up not as wanted but still nice especially for newer Ast.
Spear was the backup balance it allowed you to pull earlier of balance was a no show, the only reason you would only go for aoe balance for an opener exclusively is if going for max parse/speed kills which are not that common in the raiding scene, if just going for kill yea Spear is more than sufficient and Brds would love you for them.
Arrow was useful for War (6 fell cleaves), blm (all the fire4s), sam, Ast (especially before the malefic change), but if aoe it was a dps gain without effecting anyone.
Spire- yes this was royal road fodder but that was due to SE' s tp changes, back in HW I remember pld/mnk/drg in static all begging for tp card in a high uptime fight.
Balance was yea balance they broke it for 3.4 and took till 4.01 to rectify it, of you only fished for this and never used other cards you were a bad Ast, if you fished for this but made as strategic use as possible of the other cards you were a good Ast. And that is the big difference, balance or bust was a false meme that the devs seemed to take as truth.

Only 1 card was clutter and it was Spire.

[Maeka]

Have you gotten into a Roulette and just felt this urge to let everybody just rush in and die? Are you tempted to type angrily in chat everytime somebody makes a mistake in a duty run?

Do you get out of dungeons without saying a word to anybody, wanting to get rid of the other player's presence as fast as you can?
Are you struggling to find your role as a healer fun?

Do you join duties as healer for the rewards, because you like the role, or because you are hoping to be aknowledged by other players?

What makes you enjoy healing in FFXIV?

To be honest, my only "problem" with healing is this insane hurry that everybody is in. I don't mind the rest of it, I just don't like the pressure that's placed on me when the tank decides they absolutely must grab 3 packs anytime it's possible and they got mobs throwing down AoEs every 2 seconds because there's 30 of them and people are bound to get hit sooner or later and sometimes the tank doesn't know much about mitigation buttons or what-not and it's just.. nngh.

Other than that, though, I really don't mind healing. Trials, boss fights, those are all enjoyable to me, I like being the guy to keep people alive. The trash pulls... nngh. We could do without the trash pulls.

[Volkaj]

Just because the dps is simplified does not mean the healing aspect is fundamentally the same. It's still has a heavy emphasis on using cooldown and resource management via your faerie and aetherflow stacks. It still emphasizes damage mitigation over raw potency on your gcd healing. It still has the loop of feeding your aetherflow into fae guage for healing later.

Looking at just healing skills (which I shall remind we're only using ~10-30% of the fight, save maybe ultimate), SCH gained Recitation, Seraph/Consolation, Fey Blessing, regen on Sacred Soil, and then lost Largesse, Rouse, a bit of potency on Indom and Fey Union, and a good chunk of potency on Embrace. Out of this, the only direct mitigation boost is the addition of Seraph. The merging of Fey Illum and Fey Covenant, the regen buff on Sacred Soil and the loss of Largesse are more-or-less nerfs to SCH's mitigation capabilities.

The healing aspect has for sure changed, but if you look carefully at the kit you realize it isn't really a good change. Why? SB's SCH healing was all about managing Aetherflow to make sure you had exactly the right amount of stacks in each 45 seconds interval. Knowing which could be used for ED and which needed to be used for Indom/Exco/Lustrate/Soil.

This management aspect took several hits, the most obvious ones being Recitation (removes Aetherflow cost + crit) and Fey Blessing (free AoE healing). The other sneakier hit is the improved GCD management through the lack of Shadowflare, Rouse, Cleric Stance and matched Bio II/Aetherflow timers. Since you needed to weave these OGCDs, you'd have to Miasma II or Ruin II, and to avoid overcapping Aetherflow stacks later, you'd often want to ED in the second weaving space. But of course you could only do so if you didn't need the Aetherflow stack later. In ShB's version of SCH, since you don't have any DPS OGCDs outside ED and Bio II timer will always match Aetherflow, there's a lot less free weaving room for random EDs: if you're using Ruin II to weave something (and not for movement), 90% of the time its gonna be for healing. There's a much bigger emphasis on spamming Broil DPS-wise, since there's less free weaving spaces.

This is anecdotal, but I find myself healing a lot more through GCD and Aetherflow-free resources in ShB compared to SB.

Except for ultimate, of course. In ultimate the healing and DPS kits are perfectly adequate, especially for TEA's LL.
Shame 99% of the game isn't ultimate, and ultimate-tier healer gameplay elsewhere is a complete waste due to low healing requirements and dull DPS rotation.

[Brandedblade]

In ShB, he gained
- Strong regen on soil, making it both mitigating and restoring health
- Forced crit on whatever you like, especially excog/indom
- Seraph with 2 charges of aoe shield and the fairy casting stronger version of embrace with shields
- Fey blessing, basically aoe heal

And you say that that what made it powerful is its healing output without loosing damage..?
It's mostly the same from this point. Scholar became a more oGCD powerhouse.

As scholar, you'd always have to weave those abilites in someway, the tradeoff being a slight loose due to clipping with broil or weaving with miasma II or currently Ruin II.
If anything, scholar from a healing perspective became more powerful with minimal lose. You can now even run all around the arena and still do damage to a correct degree (200 is way better than 100 or 80 like in HW/SB)

Gutting the "extreme micromanagement" was not necessary for that.

Sacred Soil requires trading an Energy Drain to use, and while Recitation mitigates this cost for Excog and Indom, it's a 90 second cooldown that effectively only affects either every 3 indoms or every 2 excogs.

Seraph has double the cooldown of Rouse did back in stormblood, and even then all those powerful Seraph heals still cost weave slots to use, irregardless of being able to offset the potencies with Energy Drain.

Even with the buffed ogcd healing recieved in Shadowbringers. There is still the trade off of weaving space and thus potency loss. In stormblood not only was this mitigated by having more access to Aetherflow via Quickened Aetherflow, and thus more Energy Drains over a fight then we get now. But the fact you did not need to create a weave slot for any fairy action, combined with the target able stronger embraces and access to Rouse to further increase Embraces potency. A stormblood sch could do far more lossless healing just by virtue of having abilities that could be used and spammed without clipping or creating weave slots.

[Saefinn]

I love that you disagree, it's wrong but it's nice.

Just because the dps is simplified does not mean the healing aspect is fundamentally the same. It's still has a heavy emphasis on using cooldown and resource management via your faerie and aetherflow stacks. It still emphasizes damage mitigation over raw potency on your gcd healing. It still has the loop of feeding your aetherflow into fae guage for healing later.

If anything the loss of extreme micromanagement and Quickened Aetherflow was a necessary evil to bring sch back down to a reasonable level. What made it so powerful in previous expansions was the sheer amount of healing it could generate without loosing damage.

While forcing ogcd slots to command your fairy can feel clunky at times, it also takes away that raw power scholar had, it forces scholar take a damage penalty for accessing it's free ogcd healing. (Before you bring up "But AST" Ast is balanced around the fact its damage numbers are lower and that it has damage buffs it needs to juggle to make up the difference) As for Quickened Aetherflow, yeah I do miss it sometimes. But it was too powerful. It more or trivialized the use of Aetherflow by how much more frequently it gave you access to Aetherflow. As fun as it was, it ultimately took away from the intended drawback of Aetherflow, the restrictive number of uses per minute. I find that Recitation is a much more interesting tool for managing Aetherflow due to its sheer versatility in this regard.

Even though I have things I'd much prefer they did differently, I think the healing toolkit this time around is better on SCH than it was during Stormblood. Although we lost Selene, we still got a faerie update in the form of Seraph and they embraced our damage mitigation more, which should be my jam. Because this is an aspect I liked about SCH and as one who'd try to max out crit for those sweet Critlo's, the fact I can force a critlo is nice.

Personally I'd have kept the micromanagement and made Selene more useful instead of ditching her completely. Because to me they were also parts of the job. I was a heavy micromanager, because it helped you push your effectiveness as a healer. And people could still get away with an AI if they weren't confident, just they were less efficient.

So I won't deny that when I'm pushed to make use of my healing toolkit that it's fun and that's regardless of what I'd have kept or done differently. Obviously, and you know that the key phrase here is "when I am pushed to". I feel like that's the biggest flaw with the changes because they could be good changes, especially for SCH and WHM, but most of the content doesn't make them appropriate when you're not touching many of them.

But out of the suggestions I've made, I think my most preferred compromise is based around the idea of not adding or removing any of SCH's abilities nor adjusting their potency but to embrace the idea of dual purposes more and in bringing back Selene. Though I'm sure my ideas here could be better refined/defined.
Selene's equivalent faerie abilities could be based around utility.
Selene could have her own Fey Blessing based around utility
Selene could have her own Fey Union based around utility - a boost to Biolysis could be a use for a tether ability
Using Seraph with Selene could have more of a utility-based approach. I liked one person's idea of a system based around finding and exploiting weaknesses - it could be called 'Libra', but it doesn't have to specifically be that.

Then expand the usage of Emergency Tactics and Deployment Tactics to affect more abilities, which could aid party support in other ways. Such as:
Deploying Selene's Effects (if we opt for single target abilities we can weave)
Deploying Biolysis
Making Biolysis deal all of its damage at once instead of over time (like a Thunder proc on BLM)
Making Indom into an AoE (like Painflare on SMN)

I feel the outcome is that you're making the choice whether to sacrifice your own healing effectiveness to offer more utility and a better rDPS contribution to the party.
You might base your faerie choice on your co-healer or try to juggle them or pick them based on your own confidence.
You're not adding too many extra DPS abilities to make them OP, especially as DPSing comes at a cost without being janky like Cleric Stance was.
You're using skills you might not touch in your downtime and some that as healing spells increase your down time (you might have to hard cast Succor if your Indom is on CD from using it like Painflare, which is less effective).
You end up retaining the exact same skill floor (because the job can still be played exactly as it is now), but you raise the skill ceiling.

And I'd expect WHM and AST to have adjustments too, as I feel they need them too. But they'd need to be brought up too, if SCH were to receive the above treatment. (Maybe something like the COR-like adjustment I posted above for AST, but I realise card design is a divisive one I don't have enough experience on both systems to give a fair opinion on)

[Volkaj]

Sacred Soil requires trading an Energy Drain to use, and while Recitation mitigates this cost for Excog and Indom, it's a 90 second cooldown that effectively only affects either every 3 indoms or every 2 excogs.

This assumes you're using Indom and Excog on cooldown. Which is rather rare (especially for Indom) outside ultimate, since there are better tools available.

Seraph has double the cooldown of Rouse did back in stormblood, and even then all those powerful Seraph heals still cost weave slots to use, irregardless of being able to offset the potencies with Energy Drain.

The use cases of Rouse and Seraph differ. Seraph is mainly used for its Consolation ability because its Seraph Veil heal, while more powerful than Embrace, cannot be targetted. Its more of a mitigation cooldown than Rouse's single-target burst (with proper planning).

Even with the buffed ogcd healing recieved in Shadowbringers. There is still the trade off of weaving space and thus potency loss. In stormblood not only was this mitigated by having more access to Aetherflow via Quickened Aetherflow, and thus more Energy Drains over a fight then we get now. But the fact you did not need to create a weave slot for any fairy action, combined with the target able stronger embraces and access to Rouse to further increase Embraces potency. A stormblood sch could do far more lossless healing just by virtue of having abilities that could be used and spammed without clipping or creating weave slots.

The only healing ability in SB's SCH that was truly lossless was Eos' Whispering Dawn. Everything else costed a weaving slot and/or Aetherflow.
In ShB, everything costs weave slots (and there are less of them available) but there are more Aetherflow-free healing abilities: Fey Blessing, Recitation and Seraph.

Comparing the two, the only net loss would be on Whispering Dawn, which now costs at worst 80 potency to weave. Everything else seems strictly better resource-wise.