Healers need an overhaul

[QooEr]

While that definitely would be cool, I am fairly sure that they don't let it be used outside of combat as a means of stopping 30-40 second long pull timers (i.e. SCH hits Aetherflow at the beginning of a duty then they sit there and wait for it to get back).

There WERE a lot of "little" things like this that ultimately cause people who "need to do the most efficient thing" to do that were ridiculous. They really worked on removing a lot of those things (more recent one being Doton going away when you hide. Most efficient way to pull would have been to drop Doton and hide right before the pull and try to get the tank to put the boss in it. It's barely any gain at all, but it's "one of those things" that they did a good job at getting rid of.

they could do it the sage way and make them start with 3 stacks of aetherflow. no, instead take away their ability to have fun in even ways that dont matter.

Honestly... why?

It effectively just punishes you further for downtime or holding charges for rapid burst, the latter of which is the only unique affordance Aetherflow-as-an-active-ability has to warrant what would otherwise be button bloat (by essentially giving you a cap of 6 charges, up from SGE's 3).

optimal aetherflow usage would just change. but thats not a punishment. having nuances to increase your dps by a small fraction is Not punishment for not playing optimally, its a reward for planning things well.

actual punishment is things like dropping enochian, or missing trick attack's buff because you missed a positional, or losing an edge of shadow because TBN didnt break.

By turning AF into an effectively 45s CD via 5s CDR per AF action, it's that much harder to align / find use for what so often amounts to excessive healing even among just your free kit.

wouldnt you just use energy drain more often instead of the useless healing?

it being harder to align means youd have to pay more attention to the timing. quickened aetherflow would also make things more interesting than now, because of the downtime implications. it would actually make scholar a lot more interesting than it is.

personally i feel that when everything in a jobs design is perfectly smooth and on rails, the job suffers for it because it takes away decision making and planning. its why i hate how every single thing nowadays is on a 120s cooldown; the jobs need to hold everyone's hand because people cant be trusted to use their neurons for extra damage that ultimately doesnt even matter outside of savage and ultimate.