Healers, then and now:

[Sebazy]

Like...I get that might be a legitimate thing with you guys......but REALLY? I can't think of a single time since Fluid Aura was changed or removed that I even thought about it. I used it in ARR and HW, but just for a smidge of damage or in some leveling dungeons. Most things I actually WANTED to use it on were immune to it long before it was changed or removed. It's just so weird to me that people care so much about abilities that, at best, took a few seconds to position before using, if that.

This isn't a problem with fluid aura being insignificant, this is a problem with people not realising how powerful it actually was back in HW/ARR. Stormblood removed it's damage entirely leaving it as just a tool on those occasions when a pack had a single stray that wasn't playing ball.

I assume you knew the importance of keeping Assize on cooldown rather than saving it as a healing cooldown from fairly early on I'd guess? You realise that on a single target, Fluid Aura did as much DPS as assize? And back in ARR/HW it was actually even more powerful relative to our nukes? 150 potency every 30 seconds for 0 MP, back in a time when our main nuke was 170 or 210 potency and we were always having to conserve resources.

It contributed plenty, just people slept on it because A) DPS just wasn't anything like as important as it is now and B) Min maxing DPS wasn't as well understood either. Some players were too bad/lazy to use it considerately or even get in range at all thus a lot of people expected the worst when they heard it's noise.

Regarding the EX4 (I assume this is Barb right?) fight, honestly I think it's a bit of a smoke and mirrors encounter and whilst I do think it's the best primal we've had this expansion by a good margin, I still don't think it's a classic. It doesn't space it's AoE bursts out as conveniently as EX5, but they also don't hit anything like as hard, people only really need to be watched if they have vuln stacks, otherwise it's still not that threatening unless you're in an under geared group.

Ironically EX5's key AoE+ movement mechanics hit significantly harder I think? If they were a little more frequent or the puzzle phase was shorter it'd be a far better fight for it. Without Lilybell and a stock of Raptures to handle it, it'd be much more intensive.

Regarding Eye, you know it could proc off AoEs right? Including it in your spreadlo changed things up with it.

[Rilifane]

Fluid Aura was a good skill.
Its potency was pretty strong compared to the rest of our skills and as Sebazy said, especially when we had to watch for resources. There were plenty of archer/ caster type of mobs you could knock into the stack with it, starting as early as Sastasha. I was as casual as it got during ARR/ HW but Fluid Aura for free damage and in many cases knocking ranged mobs into the stack was something I still regularly did. Or a mob turned around to me from combined dps/ heal aggro and I just knocked it straight back to the tank.
And that has nothing to do with being "the speedrun type" and "rushing through dungeons" and somoene just playing to enjoy something and therefor not using it (seriously, this "I play for FUN" really needs to stop, it's getting old, it's a terrible argument. And I don't just mean you specifically, Ren. It's all over the General forum).
People slept on it for several reasons but it doesn't take away from the power of the skill itself. And ever since its removal I definitely thought several times that I could use this skill right now and it would solve the problem.

Fluid Aura wasn't insignificant. People just underestimated it when it could easily end up having much higher impact than another stone as it had more uses than just dealing damage.

[Osmond]

Reading the comments about SCH. I kept thinking that something is off with the job. Whether certain tools should give aldo/succor an instant cast to having a fairy gauge gives some sort of a fey wind equivalent. Some instances where you doing less DPS than SGE, only to realize that huh….SCH is the one doing the spam broiling just to keep up. Mainly a shield healer and starting to see an obvious problem with SCH playing SGE. I really don’t know what they can do to improve SCH this late in this expansion.

[Renathras]

Reading the comments about SCH. I kept thinking that something is off with the job. Whether certain tools should give aldo/succor an instant cast to having a fairy gauge gives some sort of a fey wind equivalent. Some instances where you doing less DPS than SGE, only to realize that huh….SCH is the one doing the spam broiling just to keep up. Mainly a shield healer and starting to see an obvious problem with SCH playing SGE. I really don’t know what they can do to improve SCH this late in this expansion.

Probably not much. Big changes happen at expansions, usually. PLD's rework was extremely unusual. Not UNHEARD of, but unusual.

AST is next up for changes, and.......it probably does actually need them slightly worse than SCH, but SCH's not far. The thing is, SCH wouldn't take that much to band-aid. If they were to do a "in a pinch band-aid fix", what it would be is increase Broil's base cast time to 2 sec (from 1.5) and re-add the Miasma 1 ability as a DoT with a 15 sec CD. Could even be instant cast. The former of those would give Ruin 2 (and Biolysis/Miasma natural refreshes) more value and place in a somewhat standard rotation, and would mimic WHM's 4 Afflatus casts per minute. It probably wouldn't be a permanent fix, but it would be a "right now" fix, though it would require a balance pass.

Oh paper, SCH isn't "broken", it's probably the most powerful Healer in the game. It does decent personal DPS (behind WHM and SGE, but not terribly so like AST), has a party buff, accessible mitigation, and some skill expression. It just has the most monotone rotation...besides AST.

AST's is still worse, it's farthest behind in solo DPS, its raid DPS is highly dependent on the party you're with, and it has the most monotone rotation (even more Malifics than SCH's Broils), with the most carpel tunnel inducing burst window that has to deal with both your oGCD pumping and targeting/retargeting between party members and boss.

.

RE: Fluid Aura

When it did damage, it didn't yet matter (ARR, part of HW; granted some of HW did need it, but that was content that was frankly overtuned), and when it stopped doing damage, it was pretty useless unless your Tanks were inept. VERY few dungeons have a single caster straggler, and those can be rounded up with a Ranged or Tank using Silence on them OR the Tank simply line of sighting/LOSing them (a lost art, I know, but I'm hardly the only person who does that). I'm honestly trying to think of any trash in modern dungeons that don't politely gather together in tight clusters for the party to AOE down such that SB's Fluid Aura would be useful.

I shoved around trash in ARR, yes, but a LOT of enemies were/are immune to the pushing. Worse was that you couldn't even use it in most 4 man boss fights or it would punt the boss to the other side of the Tank and cleave the party. XD I don't remember which bosses were and weren't immune to it, but it was kind of a craps shoot.

My point was it wasn't a super highly used, intricately important ability. It was useful for some extra tick DPS in a period where there weren't Enrages (ARR) and then when encounters supposedly weren't balanced on Healer damage (HW).

I'm just saying I didn't and haven't ever thought of any times I've missed it. It just consistently surprises me how often I see some ability that was rarely used and had lost of complications such that when it was removed, I thought "Meh...don't really care", yet THOSE are the things you guys seem to think were the most important abilities ever. There's a part of me that would like them to remove Repose just because we could conduct an experiment and see how many people come out of the woodwork insisting Repose was the most important Healer ability and how dare they remove such a nuanced, skill expression, keystone ability from Healers to test this...

Because make no mistake, there WOULD be some people saying this. I have no doubts of that. I'm just curious how many it would be.

"Come now, Anakin, which do you think it will choose? The ear or the nose?" -Obi-Wan
"<sigh> I think the nose..." -Anakin

I think we all know it would be a non-zero number that would Kaiten the hell out of Repose (or hell, Rescue) if either were removed.

Anyway, that has nothing to do with what we're talking about overall; At its best, Fluid Aura was an oGCD, and no one cares about oGCDs as far as rotation or engagement is concerned aside from AST.

[Silver-Strider]

Fluid Aura

I suppose the fun of Fluid Aura was finding ways to utilize it. There isn't really anything to healing oGCDs since whether I heal with Tetra, Solace, Lustrate, Excog, etc the result is more or less the same. Fluid Aura, on the other hand, was always experimental in if it would actually affect the boss in relation to the knockback effect and while it certainly could cause things to go pear shaped if used incorrectly, there were times when it was worth the minor inconvenience it caused as the skill also acted as a pseudo-interrupt skill that would stop certain actions from being cast.. IIRC, the 2nd boss of Sunken Temple of Qarn was affected by the knockback and it could be used to interrupt his room wide AoE attack. Same thing with Final Sting in the same dungeon and in Neverreap in HW. Sure, it wasn't perfect by any means but it was still a nice ability to have in case it could ever be useful. The fact that we can even point out an instance within the last 2 years where it would've been useful is both remarkable and bittersweet really.

[Sparkthor]

Aura Fluid wasn't the only CC ability to have some dommage pack in, WAR, DRG, NIN also got theses kind of tools, and all dommage from them was cut with SB, which is something I agree with : CC should be used for CC and not for dommage. And somehow player thinks the same as todays there is an ambiant topic on dash abilities which do dommage and people want them to not to.

We cannot expect to have another class huge work before the 7.0 which dev have already started. I would love to see some healer changes, but cannot say anything else than Wait & See.

[Osmond]

I can agree with you there Renathras lol. Despite SCHs toolkit is lame, yet pretty powerful shield healer. I was at the point, “fine I’ll sacrifice DPS, just give SCH better shields and mitigation.” I get what you are saying about needing another DoT tool. Either that or buff ruin 2 enough that it doesn’t cause DPS loss. I’m pretty sure….SE have to know that the pure healer and shield healer are in-balanced, both DPS and healing.

[Renathras]

Aura Fluid wasn't the only CC ability to have some dommage pack in, WAR, DRG, NIN also got theses kind of tools, and all dommage from them was cut with SB, which is something I agree with : CC should be used for CC and not for dommage. And somehow player thinks the same as todays there is an ambiant topic on dash abilities which do dommage and people want them to not to.

We cannot expect to have another class huge work before the 7.0 which dev have already started. I would love to see some healer changes, but cannot say anything else than Wait & See.

Agreed on both points. It's so weird to me that the gap closers are treated as parts of burst - entirely because they're "extra damage". Especially the ones with charges where you CAN hold one charge if you need it for movement, but that's suboptimal compared to just blowing it all at once. It's such an odd way to remove player choice since it's effectively telling players they're wrong if they don't stock them for burst windows and then blow them in burst windows.

Also agree with huge reworks. AST was considered for 6.2/6.3 or so, but they pushed it (and DRG) back to 7.0. I was pretty surprised they went ahead and did PLD, though I guess the change was ultimately "safe" (from a design/mechanical perspective) and/or was just SO needed they couldn't put it off any longer.

I can agree with you there Renathras lol. Despite SCHs toolkit is lame, yet pretty powerful shield healer. I was at the point, “fine I’ll sacrifice DPS, just give SCH better shields and mitigation.” I get what you are saying about needing another DoT tool. Either that or buff ruin 2 enough that it doesn’t cause DPS loss. I’m pretty sure….SE have to know that the pure healer and shield healer are in-balanced, both DPS and healing.

Well, Ruin 2 was a DPS loss before EW but was still used for weaving since it was a less (on paper) DPS loss than clipping weaves after Broil. Since Broil took up the full 2.5 sec of the GCD window, weaving an oGCD would push the next one and cause DPS loss, but Ruin 2 was instant, so it allowed for 2 oGCDs to be weaved in that GCD without any issues (technically 3, but there's some weird clipping due to animation lock unless you have 0 ping). Just making Broil 2 sec instead of 1.5 sec base cast would change this (since 2 sec casts still SLIGHTLY clip, but it wouldn't be as big of a skill cap as the prior situation while also still making Ruin 2 weaving the clearly optimal choice)

But yeah, agree the Pure/Barrier thing hasn't worked out at all. Barrier Healers have basically as much healing as Pure Healers via oGCDs, and AST specifically is basically a Pure/Barrier hybrid. The whole dichotomy there completely broke down within like one patch.

I suppose the fun of Fluid Aura was finding ways to utilize it. There isn't really anything to healing oGCDs since whether I heal with Tetra, Solace, Lustrate, Excog, etc the result is more or less the same. Fluid Aura, on the other hand, was always experimental in if it would actually affect the boss in relation to the knockback effect and while it certainly could cause things to go pear shaped if used incorrectly, there were times when it was worth the minor inconvenience it caused as the skill also acted as a pseudo-interrupt skill that would stop certain actions from being cast.. IIRC, the 2nd boss of Sunken Temple of Qarn was affected by the knockback and it could be used to interrupt his room wide AoE attack. Same thing with Final Sting in the same dungeon and in Neverreap in HW. Sure, it wasn't perfect by any means but it was still a nice ability to have in case it could ever be useful. The fact that we can even point out an instance within the last 2 years where it would've been useful is both remarkable and bittersweet really.

Perhaps, but then we end up with the Cover and Passage of Arms arguments - two thematic, iconic, and unique abilities that people are constantly demanding be changed or removed instead of "finding ways to utilize it". Can you imagine the hate now if you used Fluid Aura and punted the boss while the Melees were in the middle of their burst phase, causing them to lose 1-2 GCDs from their burst? The game and community - for better or for worse - aren't the same as they were in ARR. Hell, in ARR, we wouldn't even be having this conversation about damage or rotational complexity, especially not for Healers. Like, people complain SMN has just a level 50 Job rotation...but that was EVERY Job in ARR! Optimal WHM play was to refresh two DoTs instead of one DoT, and be in Cleric when doing so if healing wasn't required. SCH's was a slightly more smooth sit in Cleric using Lustrate for spot healing while refreshing three DoTs and spamming one filler spell, dropping out of Cleric if there was some major healing needed that Lustrate and Stoneskin couldn't cover. Take any DPS Job in the game that existed in ARR and its rotation was only about 1/3rd as complex and involved. Some Jobs could fit all their abilities on a single crossbar set, even.

The fact you can point out ONE mob in ONE pack in ONE instance within the last FOUR years that I don't think I've ever thought of nor seen anyone else point out as noteworthy (or even remember) anywhere else isn't EXACTLY a strong argument. I'm not sure remarkable is the word I'd use to describe that.

Doing a Google search, I can't find one mention anywhere - these forums, Reddit, the entire internet - of people saying they wished they had Fluid Aura for that one encounter. I think that's far more worth remarking on how few people cared about it. I did find threads about Fluid Aura being "worthless" and needing "fixing":

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-Useless-Skill

Here's the second post in that thread:

Have it reduce the damage the target deals
Make it into a ground base AoE regen that turns into Asylum later on via trait so its useful in low level content and just evolves with natural progression
Make it a Palisade-esque buff we can throw on an ally to have them take reduced damage from X seconds
Make it an oGCD damage ability that generates Lilies once the Lily System is unlocked via a trait.

Literally any one of these will be better than a single target bind that is immediately broken upon anyone hitting the target.

Ironically, they DID one of those - "Make it a Palisade-esque buff we can throw on an ally to have them take reduced damage from X seconds" - in the form of Aquaveil. A case of "be careful what you wish for", I suppose, but you literally got what you wanted. They changed the name, but not so much that they didn't keep the water theme: Fluid Aura -> Aquaveil

Aside from that, a thread on Reddit where the vast majority seem to think it's worthless, and even those talking it up are often countered by people saying it was annoying: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...lities_on_whm/

Except I only saw a handful of WHMs ever actually do that and most just randomly used it to make melee mobs fly off to the side and get rooted out of range of DPS' AoE. As someone who was maining DRG around the time of the change, I was so fucking glad they gutted it so that bad WHMs wouldn't annoy the hell out of me (and every other DPS and tank) in EX roulette.

So...I'm not sure how to take this other than Fluid Aura was not generally seen by the community as a particularly amazing ability overall (even before its nerf), and when it was removed, most seemed to be either okay with it or actively asking why it hadn't been already. Basically the same general "I don't get why you guys love X when it seemed at the time, everyone hated X". I genuinely am curious, if they removed Repose and/or Rescue in 7.0, how many of you would start talking up how useful Repose and/or Rescue were and how it was a travesty for them to be removed, even though most people today consider Repose to be a niche Deep Dungeon ability and Rescue to be active griefing. Would be an interesting experiment to see how people kinda tick on this sorta thing.

NOTE: This isn't to say missing things being removed is bad or wrong or anything like that. There are some abilities lost that I personally miss or think shouldn't have been removed - to this day I don't know why Miasma 2 wasn't kept other than maybe button bloat fears, nor why Aero 3 as a concept was abandoned (maybe they didn't want it to be a single target DPS gain, but they could have just tweaked the potency down to make it just an AOE tool in that case) - but it's more I'm consistently surprised by WHICH abilities the forum here, collectively, consider to be the big losses. Sometimes they make sense, like Miasma, Bane, Royal Road, etc. But other times...they kinda make me scratch my head.

I do believe if Repose or Rescue was removed, people would legitimately be in here complaining about it.

[ForsakenRoe]

IDK about all the other people's reasoning for why Fluid Aura was good in their opinion, but in mine it was just cos it was a button to press that wasn't stone. When they changed it and removed half of it's effect (changing it from damage + kb to 'just the kb'), I thought they took the wrong half off of it. I'd rather have just had it as 'press this to do damage'. As it stands if it came back I'd want it as a GCD with a seperate CD (Sonic Break style), with a relatively short CD like 15sec, so that we have a different button to press instead of Glare. I don't think it'd be great as an OGCD as it was back then, because that doesn't break up the GCD loop of Glare Glare Glare. Plus it'd give us the dichotomy with BLM proper, with Stone, Aero and Water (I assume it'd be called Water) to mirror Fire, Blizzard, Thunder. And I don't wanna hear about 'oh but WHMs cant use water cos of the lore and the war of the magi and the bla bla', the lore gets mangled every time it needs to, just look what happened to the AST card lore

so then why proceed to make every late game enemy immune or highly resistant to it, and on top of that code it so that even a small auto-attack would automatically break it? at that point it basically is shooting themselves in the foot with that kind of design, because they deliberately built it so that those abilities secondary effects would be basically nonexistent. and then they proceed to act dumbfounded when no one wants to use them outside of specific situations, and even more dumbfounded when people get upset about removing them instead of doing minor reworks to make those abilities look more interesting by way of simply making enemies vulnerable to it without breaking it from attacks. but that's clearly too much work, no no no we can't do that.

See this is what annoys me, it's the same ass-backwards 'logic' they used to try and justify BLU being 'limited'. 'Oh, we can't have it as a 'real' job because imagine if you could just LV5 Death the raidboss'. And then they coded every raidboss to be immune to instant death moves. 'Oh, what if a new BLU player doesn't have all the spells when they go into the raid' Yeh, imagine if a player joined a level [anything past ARR] without doing their job quests and getting their skills after getting their job crystal? Hell, imagine if a player were to get to max level, without getting the job crystal at all? A player refusing to use their Fire spells on BLM like they're RPing as Shoto Todoroki? A 'freestyle SAM' or whatever they call themselves now? There's plenty of examples of people being absolute bloody idiots in terms of how they think they should be allowed to play the game and burden randoms in their DF groups with (if they wanna do that crap with friends that tolerate it, whatever I don't care), so why did BLU have to be singled out on it? Doesn't make sense to me, plenty of ways to keep the BLU 'identity' alive and well while still letting it be engaged with for longer than '48 hours after an update patch goes live, then 30min per week for carnivale challenges'

Back to Break though, I assume they kept that as a role skill just because they had removed the slow from healers by removing Stone1, Stella and Miasma's slow, and thought 'oh wait they might have used that for strats in older content we should give them access to a slow'. I did make a post about how they should make a raid where you're forced to use all your role actions one time because I was bored. And because Repose really does kinda suck. Heck if they made it so it was like, 'in addition to Sleep, it inflicts 5% damage down for 10 seconds', so that if you're hella undergeared you can slightly mitigate with it, you would want to avoid it due to it being a GCD but it's a nice emergency tool. And make it instantcast so you can have a better chance of seeing 'oh we don't have Feint up, let me cover that with Repose' in time

I do believe if Repose or Rescue was removed, people would legitimately be in here complaining about it.

In a vacuum, removed with no other changes, a few people might complain, because 'oh look see they're removing another healer thing great thanks SE'. If it were removed and replaced with something 'actually interesting', I imagine the only complaint would be 'why couldn't they have just added the new thing without removing Repose'. Like, if a role action was added that, like previously suggested, GCD, 5% mit, 10s duration, but Repose was removed, the question would be 'why not add that to Repose as an additional effect?'

[Silver-Strider]

Ironically, they DID one of those.

Jokes aside, context is important as is the implementation. My suggestions were given during a point when WHM was in a bad spot, having lost so many useful tools, getting the dumpster fire that was the SB Lily System and Fluid Aura becoming the worst it has ever been, losing the Knockback effect entirely for a crappy bind effect. Aqua Veil came in at a point when Tanks were stronger than ever, having very little need for extra mitigation tools and 70 levels after Fluid Aura, resulting in the skill being a poor replacement since it just isn't needed anymore.

As for my remarkable comment, that was more towards the fact that a scenario where Old Fluid Aura could've been useful even existed.