Fixing Every Healer Job

[SirShady]

Scholar stuff

Yeah, honestly at this point I think the faerie gauge should just be removed, totally reworked, or left in its current meh state. It's such a clunky system with it only being a tether that's tied with all your aetherflow healing.

Physis

I gotta be honest, I've never actively thought about Physis buffing the GCD shields when I use it since I so rarely need to spend time shielding as a Sage anyway. That's just a nice little bonus when getting through the end of P4S2. A good work around would be making it so the Kardia buff is only spent by a certain number of attacks, but honestly I don't think losing an extra GCD in the rare instance you actually want to shield isn't worth stressing over. It's a tiny bit of antisynergy for a really niche case. Besides, now you have Holos to shield with as well, which is better than a physis buffed Eukrasian prognosis. I think losing 50 potency during downtime healing wouldn't make or break Sage's ability to get through mechanics. If the downtime is 10 seconds, that's still only an 150 potency of healing you're missing, less than a third of cure I, but I understand the concern.

If I'm understanding what you're saying about making it into an attack, it would just proc Kardia the one time? It might as well just be Pneuma then. I like the idea of it applying Kardia and then the healing being based on which attacks the Sage decides to use. You could potentially get more mileage out of it with your addersting spenders. My problem with making Soteria the "kardia for everyone" button is that there's already a superfluous amount of OGCD healing in Sage's kit, and outright buffing Soteria to be another AoE heal when you already have so much free heals flying around wouldn't make the "vampire healer" identity stand out. The other problem is that Physis is on a shorter cooldown than Soteria. It is the most used AoE heal on Sage because it doesn't cost Addersgall. Physis is the perfect button to put this kind of mechanic on to embrace that Kardia playstyle.

Emergency Kardia Button

The point here is to lean into that "vampire healing" archetype. Yes, just having the GCD heals proc Kardia would functionally work, but that goes against the job identity. Tying heals to your Addersting (which is much more available because of the new combo) means you get much more healing from dealing damage, and balancing your stacks with how much healing you might need as well as your new Kardia-applying physis and Soteria lends a great deal of depth to it. The point of the changes is to tie your personal damage kit to your basic healing playstyle, and to have the OPTION for it to work as an emergency button if you synergize it with your other cooldowns, but honestly a Zoe'd Pneuma will do you better in most of those circumstances anyway since it comes out faster. Simply applying Kardia to your GCD heals for a time doesn't provide this same synergy or job fantasy.

With that said I don't think emergency buttons like that should be a focus for a barrier healer fix as their whole kit is around avoiding said scenarios

Maybe I said something wrong here, but I don't want the Addersting heals to be an emergency button. I'm trying to lean into the "vampire healer" playstyle. They should be a large portion of your heals, that CAN become an emergency button with proper use of the new Physis with Soteria, so long as you've kept a stack or two of Addersting.

On an unrelated, I don't think I'd even call Sage a shield healer anyway. You rarely if ever should shield outside of putting Eukrasia Diagnosis on the tank before pulls and Eukrasia Prognosis in ultimate, and the only synergy shielding has with your kit is using Zoe/Physis to buff your next shield, which again is incredibly rare. Sage really is just a standard healer with shields tacked on to its design. If anything, my new kit encourages more shielding with the changes to Holos and Druochole.

As far button bloat, you can't expect to not add any buttons if you want to give them a DPS rotation. Your only other options be to make it a two part combo with the second attack's Eukrasia mode being tied to Addersting. I made it a three hit combo because...

-Duodosis, I like the idea of the combo but... that's all? You just changed 1 spam into 1-2 spam, where are the kit interactions? where are the build up or additional effects? Where are the branching paths? A standard combo works in other classes because as filler when its used its effects go further than just damage (building gauge, branching paths, giving buffs...) but this combo doesn't really do anything like that, its fake depth.

I mean we get rid of Tridosis and just stick to Duodisis and make it a 1-2 combo that builds Addersting, to use on the Eukrasia'd version. This would lower it to only 1 new button.

[Silver-Strider]

Yeah, honestly at this point I think the faerie gauge should just be removed, totally reworked, or left in its current meh state. It's such a clunky system with it only being a tether that's tied with all your aetherflow healing.

Why not have the Fairy Gauge work sort of like BRD's Soul Gauge then?
Have Bio and Miasma have a chance of building up the gauge by 5 points per tic, with Broil also granting 5 gauge and having each Fairy ability cost 25/50 gauge to use with the SCH starting off with a full gauge.
Dissipation would need to be reworked for it to function but it could work.

[SirShady]

Why not have the Fairy Gauge work sort of like BRD's Soul Gauge then?
Have Bio and Miasma have a chance of building up the gauge by 5 points per tic, with Broil also granting 5 gauge and having each Fairy ability cost 25/50 gauge to use with the SCH starting off with a full gauge.
Dissipation would need to be reworked for it to function but it could work.

Yeah honestly having the Fairy Gauge tied to Aetherflow is just a clunky idea overall, but folks here didn't seem to like the idea of a passive resource gain, and I think having it apply to the DoTs would be too much RNG. I'd rather they just scrapped Fey Union at this point and turn the gauge into a support tool. Let it give out buffs instead of having it be just a resource for an interruptible tether heal running off of other healing...

[WaxSw]

Fae gauge

Yeah its an underused gauge at this point and they should lean far more into it with a hopefully rework of aetherflow

Physis

Yeah the buff is far from the most important thing but it just was one of those nitpicks that in the case of a full Sage fix I'd like to see addressed, there is also the question of relative kardia power in that physis vs the regen as if the regen is high enough to make the kardia buff loss not relevant then, Why is there? and if its a relevant lost then Sage is losing more than gaining.

The thing about the physis GCD is that precisely by adding it to soteria as the kardia for everyone Sage doesn't really lose any AoE healing Ogcd while gaining more strenght into the dps to heal identity and interactions with Zoe which I also consider another underdeveloped mechanic. The cooldown discussion I feel is meaningless firstly because those can be changed around in the case of a fix and lastly because physis is not even close to be the most used Sage heal, Kerachole is, and by a huge gap as its used close to on cooldown due to its insane power.

Emergency kardia

Probably didn't read it right then if its for the sake of the dps to heal go ahead, it just seemed you were treating it like an emergency only thing.

The unrelated

The whole shield vs regen healer to begin with is a stupid discussion to be fair, one of those things the devs "want" to impose to us while failing in the design departament

Button bloat and the dps

Here I disagree heavily, one can have a decent enough rotation without introducing barely any buttons and BLM is the living example of how with little core buttons there is a deep and interesting rotation relying more on passive effects, upgrades and traits than introducing brand new stuff to press

If you don't mind I'll try to do a (pretty flawed) example of how with your buttons imo it could be done using something I thought about time ago:

Dosis->Duodosis: gives addersting like you said.
Toxicon: spender of addersting, when used gives a buff stack that increases the potency of the next eukrasian toxicon.
Eukrasian toxicon: lower damage than toxicon unless buffed and uses addersting too, its use gives a stack that buffs Eukrasian duodosis.
Eukrasian Duodosis: lowest damage of the kit unless buffed when it becomes stronger than the previous tools
Phlegma: Also gives addersting

So you have Dosis->Duodosis combo that builds into Toxicon->E!Toxicon combo that build into E!Duodosis as the final spender, inbetween you use phlegma and keep the dot ticking
Of course this is flawed as it would give sage way too much mobility for example, potencies would have to be thought about and it may not interat well with the party buffs but stuff like that is what I meant by leaning into eukrasia more as it allows to have essentialy a double button for every new button that is added.

[Nizzi]

Yeah its an underused gauge at this point and they should lean far more into it with a hopefully rework of aetherflow

Genuine curious question - why do people want the devs to make Scholar revolve around the Fae Gauge? Gauge in this game are all the same thing - they're build and spend. What could be done with "leaning into" the Fae Gauge that wouldn't be the same thing it is at the moment?

And why do you think that Aetherflow needs a rework? In my opinion, it works far better than Lilies or Addersgall do for WHM or SGE and it's way more flexible in usage and implementation.

[WaxSw]

fey gauge and aetherflow

Its all personal opinion but about the gauge is mainly because it can give more depth to the fairy skills than only being limited by a cooldown. It could allow for a more interesting resource management, it would be build and spend yes but if properly managed it could lead to Sch having to think more deeply about the efficiency of the tools vs their effectiveness in the short and long term, allowing smart and efficient Sch to rely more on their pets than less experienced ones and as such giving a skill ceiling in the healing that is not simply "do not use X unless you dont have anything else"and because right now is used in a way that has very little impact on Sch gameplay when one could think that in a pet healer a pet related gauge would be something big. (I have an old example of how I'd envisioned that gauge in this forum that could give a better idea of what I talk about, keep in mind it was before EW tho)

About Aetherflow:

Because it does not fit the current game, the game is moving to a place where more free healing is happening than ever and Aetherflow in its current iteration only serves to punish Sch when used to fulfil its role. One could argue that it serves as a way to force Sch to really think about the way they approach their healing and while that is to some extent true the approach is very rarely something more deep than "not use it" instead of "use X instead of Y" is not that much of depth, if healing is a puzzle "do not use this piece that is core to the job" shoudn't be the correct solution that often, worst of all is that in relevant content the Sch is rarely the one paying for its own mistakes as is usually the cohealer who has to pick up the slack. One could also argue that is allows Sch for more dps depth but imo that should come from its own dps rotation and not from a tool that penalize it for healing, especially when once again, if the healing is not done properly more often than not the Sch is not the one paying the consequences

About the flexibility sorry but I disagree, Addersgall and Aetherflow are the exact same thing with the only difference being that one does not penalize the job that interacts with the system and as such all of the tools in it are used more frequently while the other penalize its use on any heal, look at the parses and see out of all the aetherflow how many are used on ED vs the rest of actions if they are used at all (Spoiler: Top Sch in P4s only use AE to heal once and left its cohealer deal almost twice as much healing as they did). The current Aetherflow design creates a dominant strategy within the mechanic of using it in ED in almost its entirely while Addersgall allow for its tools to have breathing room where they all can see use (Same argument with Lillies with the difference of not being so quite the exact same thing and its use being encouraged more as it makes the job not only more capable of healing but also allows for smart Whm to capitalize raid buffs).