Healing Spells You Do Not Mind Being Removed in PvE

[Supersnow845]

I disagree. Removing ED in shb was the best thing ever. THey just needed to reblance how aetherflow worked and it would've been great.

They had to have a dump for aetherflow since it’s generated as a bulk rather than one at a time, if they made it one at a time you just have another lily/addersgall and without energy drain you have literally no incentive to spend it

The only way you can kinda force an aetherflow system to work is make it an exact copy of addersgall but even addersgall is highly flawed because of the druachole dump, plus you remove basically the entire skill floor and skill ceiling from the class in one shot

The healers already have too much bloat in terms of free oGCD’s, every healer should be like SCH rather than SCH be the bad one

[Archwizard]

They had to have a dump for aetherflow since it’s generated as a bulk rather than one at a time, if they made it one at a time you just have another lily/addersgall and without energy drain you have literally no incentive to spend it

On the other hand though, overcapping is still just as much of an issue for SCH as it is for SGE, since they both generate a stable rate of 3 Aetherflow/Addersgall per minute (before Rhizomata or Dissipation ofc).
Despite that, SGE doesn't have a dump for "oh my third Addersgall is about to come off cooldown and I need to keep them all cycling," nor does SCH have anything preventing them from using Aetherflow on cooldown regardless for the extra MP.

The main reason they don't do that is because Energy Drain makes it a damage gain to use all of them.

In theory though you could kill two birds with one stone, trim a slot and lose zero functionality by just combining Aetherflow and Energy Drain (a la SMN) with the caveat that it deals more damage (and grants some Faerie Gauge) for every Aetherflow you still had banked when you activated it, as if you had Energy Drained each of those slots before activation. You already can't Aetherflow out of combat anyway, and this would just make that slightly more convenient by allowing you to open with ED rather than having to wait a GCD into combat.

The healers already have too much bloat in terms of free oGCD’s, every healer should be like SCH rather than SCH be the bad one

Ehhh... as I said before, SCH fills 3 whole action bars on PC; if you're arguing about "too much bloat in terms of free oGCDs" then SCH is still one of the worst cases, especially when it has redundancies like Fey Blessing vs Indomitability.

[Supersnow845]

On the other hand though, overcapping is still just as much of an issue for SCH as it is for SGE, since they both generate a stable rate of 3 Aetherflow/Addersgall per minute (before Rhizomata or Dissipation ofc).
Despite that, SGE doesn't have a dump for "oh my third Addersgall is about to come off cooldown and I need to keep them all cycling," nor does SCH have anything preventing them from using Aetherflow on cooldown regardless for the extra MP.

The main reason they don't do that is because Energy Drain makes it a damage gain to use all of them.

In theory though you could kill two birds with one stone and lose zero functionality by just combining Aetherflow and Energy Drain (a la SMN) with the caveat that it deals more damage (and grants some Faerie Gauge) for every Aetherflow you still had banked when you activated it, as if you had Energy Drained each of those slots before activation. You already can't Aetherflow out of combat anyway, so...



Ehhh... as I said before, SCH fills 3 whole action bars on PC; if you're arguing about "too much bloat in terms of free oGCDs" then SCH is still one of the worst cases, especially when it has redundancies like Fey Blessing vs Indomitability.

As to your first point that’s why energy drain works and needs to stay in its current form, if pressing aetherflow just spent the remainder of your energy drains it wouldn’t really change anything about the current system but it’s still better than addersgall

And as to your second yes all the healers are bloated with excessive oGCD’s but I will say fey blessing and indom have different uses, fey blessing is a totem heal and is totally free damage wise, indom can be forced to crit for a stronger heal but costs aetherflow so is used more as a reserve

Overall they are too similar and SCH doesn’t need this many heals (like all of them) but SCH at least has most of their heals have roughly different functions, I’d still prefer something like 3.0 or 4.0 though

[Zolvolt]

As to your first point that’s why energy drain works and needs to stay in its current form, if pressing aetherflow just spent the remainder of your energy drains it wouldn’t really change anything about the current system but it’s still better than addersgall

And as to your second yes all the healers are bloated with excessive oGCD’s but I will say fey blessing and indom have different uses, fey blessing is a totem heal and is totally free damage wise, indom can be forced to crit for a stronger heal but costs aetherflow so is used more as a reserve

Overall they are too similar and SCH doesn’t need this many heals (like all of them) but SCH at least has most of their heals have roughly different functions, I’d still prefer something like 3.0 or 4.0 though

Idk, I'm pretty thankful to have both Fey blessing and Indom this raid tier. They don't fit the same uses and are both valued.

[Supersnow845]

Idk, I'm pretty thankful to have both Fey blessing and Indom this raid tier. They don't fit the same uses and are both valued.

Which is why I said “they have different functions” and then proceeded to explain said different functions

My problem isn’t with fey blessing vs indom it’s every healer has too many oGCD’s

[Zolvolt]

Which is why I said “they have different functions” and then proceeded to explain said different functions

My problem isn’t with fey blessing vs indom it’s every healer has too many oGCD’s

I don't share that view, but I am interested in why you feel that way. Would you prefer if the healing game was shifted more towards losing dps to GCD heal?

[Supersnow845]

I don't share that view, but I am interested in why you feel that way. Would you prefer if the healing game was shifted more towards losing dps to GCD heal?

Call me old fashioned but I just want something akin to the 3.x healers, they had damage rotations, they had “some” oGCD’s that could be planned around but they were never actual full replacements for your GCD kit, optimisation came from how long you could spend in cleric stance and minimising GCD’s but not being totally discouraged from using them at all

Something more in that vein, 10,000 oGCD’s + 1 button spam is just the worst design they could have gone with for healers

[Zolvolt]

Call me old fashioned but I just want something akin to the 3.x healers, they had damage rotations, they had “some” oGCD’s that could be planned around but they were never actual full replacements for your GCD kit, optimisation came from how long you could spend in cleric stance and minimising GCD’s but not being totally discouraged from using them at all

Something more in that vein, 10,000 oGCD’s + 1 button spam is just the worst design they could have gone with for healers

Thats fair. The healing game was certainly different when you couldn't OGCD between dps casts.

[Archwizard]

but I will say fey blessing and indom have different uses, fey blessing is a totem heal and is totally free damage wise, indom can be forced to crit for a stronger heal but costs aetherflow so is used more as a reserve

Idk, I'm pretty thankful to have both Fey blessing and Indom this raid tier. They don't fit the same uses and are both valued.

I see your point, and I agree that the variety is valuable, but realistically -- knowing that SCH absolutely is up for a trim because of how many actions it has -- which of its actions are first up on the chopping block? That is after all the point of this thread.

SCH doesn't have 1:1 redundant actions like WHM does; as Supersnow mentioned, most of SCH's heals have different functions, which means flexible thinking is required.
It doesn't (at this time anyway) have a Eukrasia to sidestep trimming like SGE does, so we need to start prioritizing.
And just cutting Physick (if that's even on the table) alone isn't enough to pull its action count down. Unfortunately that means we have to look at actions that aren't useless, but are luxuries to have.

In theory, you can have Fey Blessing's place in the kit substituted with a trait, or Indomitability replaced completely as an Aetherflow action depending on which one you find more valuable. Because you have two AoE burst healing oGCDs, so they're the the closest thing to "redundant" in the kit now that we have a charge system.
Cuz if we're looking at the lowest priority oGCDs, it's one of those or... what, Deployment Tactics overlapping with Succor?

[Renathras]

The more I consider Scholar, the more it strikes me how badly the job requires a major rework.

...

At the very least, I think there needs to be a serious examination of whether the job needs both Aetherflow and so many faerie actions, because it desperately needs streamlining and both systems could stand to be consolidated.

I disagree with some of your points, but I agree with almost everything in this post. The thing is, that's part of what makes SCH so awesome. All of its tools pretty much DO have a use. There's not a lot of "this is useless" bloat skills. While there are some case that could use a bump (I've argued that Lustrate should upgrade to getting a barrier like Benison to make it useful for overcapping - if that actually WAS the case, then we wouldn't be as desperate for Energy Drain from the "prevents overcapping" angle, at least). Protraction is a new skill that might seem to have niche use, but that use is to make Adlo even more powerful or to boost co-healer or tank healing, which is hardly worthless. Fey Blessing might seem meh, but it allows burst totem healing and isn't competing with any other resources (other than Seraph/Dissipation CDs themselves or Fey Union's channel, though that can be easily reactivated after), making it a quick go-to heal since many points in a given fight, it has zero opportunity cost.

In fact, many of Eos' abilities have little opportunity cost.

Each AF button has a good use-case. Lustrate IS the weakest, but if you need a quick single target heal to prevent a death and Excog is on CD, it's perfect for that. Some people don't use Fey Illumination, but that 5% magic resist is something that no other healer has as a "free" extra mitigation on SCH's part, even ignoring the GCD healing boost. Expedience is amazing both for movement and damage reduction. Soil is useful for damage reduction and overall healing. Emergency Tactics can make Adlo into a big heal, but it can also make Succor + ET Succor + Succor functional in multi-hit boss attacks (e.g. ZodEx 7-8-9 hit lasers) easy to handle even if you somehow have all your CDs unavailable otherwise. Seraph is powerful, and they already combined the Consolation button. It's the only healer with an on-demand movement attack tool in Ruin 2.

There's a fair amount of wonky stuff in the kit, but every button has a clear use case, and none are worthless/next-to-worthless or feel like padding. So while it has so many, there's no obvious places to cut since they're all USEFUL (contrast Cure 1, Undraw, Pepsis, and so on)

EDIT:

Call me old fashioned but I just want something akin to the 3.x healers, they had damage rotations, they had “some” oGCD’s that could be planned around but they were never actual full replacements for your GCD kit, optimisation came from how long you could spend in cleric stance and minimising GCD’s but not being totally discouraged from using them at all

While I somewhat agree with you that a shift back towards 3.0/2.0 healing, 4.0 being a happy medium, wouldn't be bad, and I DO agree that healers having so many oGCDs is part of the problem today with "healer boredom" (e.g. you can oGCD most healing away, so that leaves you with just a one-button nuke spam and 30 sec DoT refresh to do as far as GCDs are concerned for most fights), healers didn't have complicated "rotations" back then, either. WHM has approximately the same amount of damage tools today as it did then, for example, and Cleric Stance was one of the worst mechanics in MMO history. I get some people love it, but that's hard-core rose-tinted goggles talking. It was miserable to use in many situations, created massive disparity between players that did it and those that didn't, or didn't as well, caused a lot of healers to outright fear dpsing, and just caused an absolute mess of problems across the board for no real benefit other than 1% of players feeling slightly less bored (but still complaining about it) until it was removed. People complain now when they get in groups with healers that don't dps or don't dps much, that's even worse when healers are told they need to be in Cleric to dps, if they aren't their dps is even worse than it is today, and mid-core healers just don't do it at all because they fear being in the "damage stance" when they need to heal (even with a short CD). It would make the ">0 but still little dps healer" problem 500x worse.

Trading healing for damage doesn't work well in a game, as there's almost always a "right" choice making the other "wrong". If the "right" choice is healing, then old Cleric was just bad. If the "right" choice was damage, then it made the role of healer unfulfilling to players who are drawn to the role because they enjoy healing and not damage dealing. Energy Drain/Disipation already rubs people the wrong way because of it bumping up against this problem, and that's stupidly minor compared to Cleric.

The amount of schism in the community and headache in Job and encounter balance caused by that one ability made doing away with it the obvious correct choice.