Can we delete Seraph, Dissipation, Excog and Sacred Soil? Some ideas on top of it...

[Shurrikhan]

Sorry to derail, but what SCH during ARR or Heavensward ever used Sacred Soil? Sacred Soil and Shadowflare were mutually exclusive, so using Sacred Soil meant losing DPS :-p

Due to its CD, you couldn't outright maintain Shadowflare anyways. You merely kept them aligned apart from each other as best you could.

And the minor damage ticks of Shadowflare would get the boot over Soil any time the latter's mitigation would exceed the value of other non-ED Aetherflow tools.

[elioaiko]

I think all of these skills are useful, it's just that they are chained to Aetherflow, a poorly aging system.

With it how it is, it will always be optimal to use Energy Drain if your co-healer doesn't lose damage for popping a heal.

Dissapition has always been problematic IMO, it only encourages even more ED and locks out half your kit. If they still had different fairies, you could use Dissapition to absorb Eos and summon Serene with a buff to all fairy skills for 30s until Eos gets resummoned. Have their skills change depending on which fairy is out. Fey Illumination (damage MIT) /Fey Covenant (AoE shield) , Whispering Dawn/Fey Blessing (buffed to the equal of using an Indom).

I feel like this way, you're swapping between them with Dissapition with some choice of decisions.

Give the oGCD heals normal CDs and have aetherflow deleted or reworked into SMN's current Aetherflow, which should replace SMN's Aetherflow with something more meaningful relating to summons).

I mean SCH is a military doctor of sorts, so I feel like they should lean into the poison aspect. Wars tends to use chemical warfare to give them an upper and in battle. Give them two dots with Bane and give them Fester for ST nuke and Tridisaster for AoE nuke. This can honestly replace Art of War.

[Deceptus]

Dissapition has always been problematic IMO, it only encourages even more ED and locks out half your kit. If they still had different fairies, you could use Dissapition to absorb Eos and summon Serene with a buff to all fairy skills for 30s until Eos gets resummoned. Have their skills change depending on which fairy is out. Fey Illumination (damage MIT) /Fey Covenant (AoE shield) , Whispering Dawn/Fey Blessing (buffed to the equal of using an Indom).

I feel like this way, you're swapping between them with Dissapition with some choice of decisions.

This is exactly what I would have preferred and it would have added some tactician role. CD to swap fairies and possibly reset the CD's of abilities.

Selene could have been the Party buffing fairy and Eos could have been the more healing focused

[Denji]

No, the problem was that the "more complex" healers didn't enjoy the complexity enough that it was a reward in itself.

That is, all of you saying "I don't want to be bored" are lying - what you REALLY MEAN is "I want to be a DPS and do more damage".

The problem in SB is that AST and SCH had more involved kits - so in theory weren't bored - but they complained that their "more work" should mean "more damage", even though the Devs said over and over that healer damage was balanced and they weren't going to buff it. But the "I don't want to be bored" players kept complaining. How DARE people that aren't like them enjoy healing and have comparable performance! So the Devs gutted all the healing kits in a "corrupt-a-wish" sort of way: "Now you don't do more work than WHMs! Happy now?!"

The question comes down to: Is it that you really just want more buttons to push to not be bored...or do you really want to play a damage dealer and just do more damage?

I think this is the crux of all of these discussion and people don't want to address it because they probably see themselves in this picture and don't like it.

If it really IS just you being bored and wanting more buttons to push, then it shouldn't matter that there's a healer Job out there that does the same damage with less button presses and that players who DON'T want to be a "dps-lite" can enjoy it and perform comparably to you on it. After all, your goal was to not be bored, not to outpace less skilled/dedicated players, right? Especially when you factor in that WHM has the least overall utility of all the healers.

THANK YOU.

I have always been very frustrated by this. Don't get me wrong, healers could still use some work. I find them all to be a little bland... but most of the time it isn't ever about whether or not they have more to do, it's just "I want to murder more".

You wanna be a healer with good DPS? Go be a rez mage.

[Nizzi]

Given that you'd lose 195 potency on each Energy Drain whose use would cause you to need a GCD heal, there's plenty of reason to use Aetherflow on healing... so long as there's damage actually being taken. The problem there isn't ED, but the content.

Oh definitely, I don't think ED is a problem at all, I just think it's fine for what it is. If we start to get more Aetherflow DPS abilities though, Energy Drain becomes vestigal as you're always going to want to hit the one that does more damage. If SCH got old Fester based on DoTs, you'd just never hit ED because Fester would always be better.
Ideally I'd like for Energy Drain to feel more like something I got to hit because of a job well done in managing my other healing cooldowns rather than "oh well guess my co-healer WHM is going to spam GCD heals the entire time, welp time to spend Aetherflow only on ED" though with all of that being said I don't want them touching Energy Drain at all outside of giving the 500 MP per stack back to it. Energy Drain is genuinely the only interesting DPS tool any of the healers have left.

[QooEr]

No, the problem was that the "more complex" healers didn't enjoy the complexity enough that it was a reward in itself.

That is, all of you saying "I don't want to be bored" are lying - what you REALLY MEAN is "I want to be a DPS and do more damage".

forum posters arent a monolith you know. i played ast since heavensward even when everyone in my fc told me it was garbage because the job was fun to me. if i wanted to be a dps and do more damage then... i would be playing a dps?
i didnt stop playing scholar because it "doesnt do damage"; its the highest rdps healer at the moment. i stopped playing it because it lost like 9 actions and became boring.

The problem in SB is that AST and SCH had more involved kits - so in theory weren't bored - but they complained that their "more work" should mean "more damage", even though the Devs said over and over that healer damage was balanced and they weren't going to buff it. But the "I don't want to be bored" players kept complaining. How DARE people that aren't like them enjoy healing and have comparable performance! So the Devs gutted all the healing kits in a "corrupt-a-wish" sort of way: "Now you don't do more work than WHMs! Happy now?!"

this is just fiction. find me a thread from stormblood that has this discussion. i scoured the threads from 2019 and back in the healer forums and guess what? the only balance discussions seem to revolve around buffing whm
i doubt you will find even a single post saying "buff sch" "buff ast" or "nerf whm" that isnt from exactly 4.0 where scholar was lackluster.
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...aid-everywhere.
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...eds-some-nerfs
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...aying-Nerf-___
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...al-damage-buff
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-getting-buffs
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...vensward-again
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...HM-pDPS-in-4.3
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-sky-is-an-AST.

please just stop spreading lies. also...! it will surprise you that some people still thought healer dps was boring back then. not weak, boring.
these threads have aged like fine wine.
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ed-in-the-game
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-filler-spells.
the fact that we want to go back to these days kind of says a lot

The question comes down to: Is it that you really just want more buttons to push to not be bored...or do you really want to play a damage dealer and just do more damage?

its always been the first. pretending its the second one is disingenuous. people keep saying "i want more to do" and you somehow keep hearing "i want to do more dps".

I think this is the crux of all of these discussion and people don't want to address it because they probably see themselves in this picture and don't like it.

If it really IS just you being bored and wanting more buttons to push, then it shouldn't matter that there's a healer Job out there that does the same damage with less button presses and that players who DON'T want to be a "dps-lite" can enjoy it and perform comparably to you on it. After all, your goal was to not be bored, not to outpace less skilled/dedicated players, right? Especially when you factor in that WHM has the least overall utility of all the healers.

no one is having that conversation right now. despite all the awful things the healer role has going for it, its actually the most balanced number wise it has ever been.

[Shurrikhan]

Oh definitely, I don't think ED is a problem at all, I just think it's fine for what it is. If we start to get more Aetherflow DPS abilities though, Energy Drain becomes vestigal as you're always going to want to hit the one that does more damage. If SCH got old Fester based on DoTs, you'd just never hit ED because Fester would always be better.

Just by way of quick example, I wouldn't want to see SCH get SMN's old Fester since that'd just be a less responsive but harder-hitting ED-but-without-mana-gen. But, I wouldn't mind seeing SCH regain Bane, or even to replace Bane with Pulse (spreading your buffs, or just the strongest shield, on an ally to those within, say, 12 yalms or doubling the duration of your DoTs on the target and splitting its duration across all nearby enemies while adding a debuff that causes them to spread their remaining durations of your debuffs if/when those affected enemies die).

Ideally I'd like for Energy Drain to feel more like something I got to hit because of a job well done in managing my other healing cooldowns rather than "oh well guess my co-healer WHM is going to spam GCD heals the entire time, welp time to spend Aetherflow only on ED" though with all of that being said I don't want them touching Energy Drain at all outside of giving the 500 MP per stack back to it. Energy Drain is genuinely the only interesting DPS tool any of the healers have left.

Agreed, but heal-sniping isn't something we can make up for with one's kit. oGCDs already have as much advantage in that regard over GCDs as is possible.

That said, I wouldn't mind ED being a little stronger. It's a 100p gain if used well, 195p penalty (of needing a further GCD heal from having overexpended available AF healing) if used poorly. Bringing its potency up to at 150p (and adding back a small MP boost, or leaving it at 100p but with a larger MP boost) would be totally fine if/when healers are given more to actually heal so SCH's unique ability to trade out otherwise wasted (overheal) resource isn't too huge an advantage.

[VentVanitas]

[elioaiko]

This is exactly what I would have preferred and it would have added some tactician role. CD to swap fairies and possibly reset the CD's of abilities.

Selene could have been the Party buffing fairy and Eos could have been the more healing focused

It honestly baffles me that they made the fairies the same because they think that the fairies are the real problem. Having two fairies to swap from have interesting dynamics they could play into like you said.

[Sebazy]

That is, all of you saying "I don't want to be bored" are lying - what you REALLY MEAN is "I want to be a DPS and do more damage".

Sweeping generalisations are bad pls.

I was about the biggest Sylphie you could imagine especially back during HW. If it was my choice, healing would be far more frantic than it is now, random cleaves, splash damage, damage shields etc. I want to be pushed, but FFXIV's healing just doesn't do it, it hasn't for years now.

I think the biggest mistake you're making here is to assume that our DPS complexity is the only thing we've lost over the years when the reality is that you couldn't be further from the truth with that.

We've lost our buffing busy work, go back to ARR and you'd see SCHs merrily weaving Selene's buffs even if the reality was that they were less impactful than simply keeping Eos out for Whispering Dawn so you could Ruin more. Not to mention shielding required much more precision than it does today with slow casting shields being required on bosses that would merrily auto them off right before a rapid tank buster. AST is the best exception here of course, but even it's buff kit is a far cry from the mini game it used to be.

We've also entirely lost our debuffing kit. Remember when Virus chains were a thing? Eye for an Eye?

Lastly, resource management just isn't a thing anymore, MP for healers is pretty much a 'don't spam medica II' gauge coupled with some way to keep in combat raises somewhat under control in anything that doesn't enrage. A large part of that is down to us being able to offload so much of our healing on free oGCDs (E12S pt1 was pretty taxing on MP because the AoEs were frequent enough to actually start requiring GCD heals at times) but it's also far too quick to recover MP back as a healer as well. By comparison, a geared up dead Cleric in EQ1 could be out of the picture for 10+ minutes without Modrods.

The core problem is that once you've memorised the dance, there's very little to actually focus on as a healer between key mechanics. I want to have to pay attention, not find myself drifting off towards the second screen. At this point I'm far beyond caring how SE actually achieve this, just that they actually make an effort to give me something to do that isn't mindlessly mashing the same button.