Art of War Thought?

[Sealish]

Hi, so something that I keep seeing is how underwhelmed people are with Art of War. Personally I love it, it is my favorite of the Healer AoEs. I know many people like Holy. I do not, so people have their own preferences.

<Tangent, ignore if you want>
I remember being so excited to unlock Holy all those years ago when lvling my WMH (my first class ever and at launch. I stopped playing for a few years and decided to start fresh on a new account a couple years back cause I wanted the free sub month and I was going to start a new character anyways). I was so disappointed. It had a long cast time and then a long delay before it actually hit. It felt like it took a good 5 seconds to even do anything, and when it went off it was a big pink disco ball, not anything like holy looked like in any of the other FF games I had played where it was rays of light piercing enemies. It obscured view, was ugly, and felt super clunky. It was effective, but that was it. I hated using it.
</Tangent>

Anyways, Art of War. I like the animation. It is low to the ground and so does not cause visual clutter and I like the understated visual. I love that it is instant cast since it means that I can spam it when needed while still having my full array of oGCD tools. But I will admit that having it be a PBAoE is strange for the class lore. A tactician should not be wading ankle deep into the melee. I think a small change would make it feel way better.

What if it was still PBAoE if cast normally, but if cast on your faerie would radiate from them instead (or have a separate button that cast it on the faerie to avoid the weird pet targeting stuff). Your character would still cast it, the faerie would not, but it would radiate from the faerie like a focus.

At first I thought that it would be cool if you could cast it on any party member (but not enemies) and it would radiate from them... but that may be a bit unbalanced and would step on Gravity's toes because you would just always cast it on the tank.

[Kabooa]

Their issue is that it replaced Miasma 2.

That's it.

At the start of Shadowbringers when the class revamps came in, Miasma 2 was previously a high MP weaving tool / spammable AoE.

The function of that spell was split into Ruin 2 and Art of War, with Ruin 2 having equivalent potency for single target weaving and Art of War having higher potency when taking back-to-back spam into consideration. The overall MP cost was reduced.

Maybe the visual and sound is underwhelming, but that's personal opinion.

[ItMe]

Didn't it used to provide a slow or something?
(Or was that AST...?)

[Sealish]

That makes sense. I have seen people upset about Miasma 2 going away, but I have also seen a lot of people just hating on Art of War in a vacuum not liking the skill its self on it's own merit and comparing it to the other current AoE healer skills, with the PBAoE nature of it and the Visuals/Sound being the things that they harp on the most.

I agree that Miasma 2 should just have been tweaked if they were going to change things up rather than replace it with Art of War.

[Teno]

I hate the animation, which is the worst part about it aside from the fact that it's boring. I used to cast spells with my book and I always felt SCH/SMN animations were beautifully made for the most part. Come shadowbringers, and suddenly I tap the ground with my hand, AND they removed shadowflare and bane. At the very least they could have worked something out with the book...

[Sealish]

Maybe what could have been fun is if they got rid of Art of War and gave us back Miasma 2 but changed Miasma 2 to do no initial damage, but instead do 40 potency per tick over 12s and allowed the Dot to stack instead of refresh. That would give it a final potency of 180 per cast (less than Ruin 2 so would still be just for AoE) but would have a unique feel to it. Given that AoE adds don't really live that long there would be lost potency from them dying before all the dots expired and so the higher potency per cast would even out.

[Sealish]

I hate the animation, which is the worst part about it aside from the fact that it's boring. I used to cast spells with my book and I always felt SCH/SMN animations were beautifully made for the most part. Come shadowbringers, and suddenly I tap the ground with my hand, AND they removed shadowflare and bane. At the very least they could have worked something out with the book...

The punching the ground bit is a little silly. I like the rest of the effect though personally, but yes... they should replace the punch with a book thing.

[KDSilver]

I'd like both.
Miasma II to apply the dot for 200-300 pot and Art of War as a filler.

[Allegor]

I hate the animation, which is the worst part about it aside from the fact that it's boring. I used to cast spells with my book and I always felt SCH/SMN animations were beautifully made for the most part. Come shadowbringers, and suddenly I tap the ground with my hand, AND they removed shadowflare and bane. At the very least they could have worked something out with the book...

This is the main reason I hate it. Hitting the ground once as if doing a summoning jutsu from Naruto looks great if done for a cooldown, like say, sacred soil, but because it's spammable it just feels really, really stupid to go on melee range and slap the ground, slap the ground, slap the ground!

[Anhra]

Didn't it used to provide a slow or something?
(Or was that AST...?)

It is a recycled Skill from PvP which Scholar used to have. It used to have a Knockback Effect which was really powerful on the Field of Glory (shatter) Map because if you got lucky, you could knock over multiple People into their "unfortunate demise" and let gravity do the rest.

So yeah, for some brilliant reason, they just removed the fun part of the Skill and gave it to the PvE kit (it even has the exact same animation btw, just the "shockwave animation" got a bit more of a darkblueish color, instead of the previous white/lightblue coloring).