Dawntrail Wishlist top 3 desired healer additions

[ForsakenRoe]

Thats not better, though. Dumping more Drupcholes on myself to restore MP more frequently than I actually heal with Addersgall feels like poo poo bananas. A job that feels compelled to needlessly overheal because fights can’t keep up with how rapidly Addersgall generates? Joy!

If nothing else, moving MP management somewhere else would be a big improvement.

Yes, I'm also not a massive fan of overhealing via Druochole on myself just to sustain my MP. But the point is, that there's SOMEthing that keeps 'spend your Addersgall and don't overcap' happening, even if the fight doesn't demand those Galls to be spent. Energy Drain is in a paradoxical situation, where it is somehow both 'the only vestiges of depth left on healers' and also 'this means you can't use your OGCD heals because they're a damage loss'. If Lilies being 100p of damage lost per cast in 5.0-5.5 (4 Glares being 1200p, Misery being 900, 300 lost total/100 per Lily) was such an issue that it had to be rectified, why is Energy Drain, which causes the same potency loss when a heal is used in place of it, getting a pass? I'm not against the idea of having a 'dump action', far from it, I think that Energy Drain's removals have illustrated that the class falls apart without something useful to dump spare Aetherflow on. I just disagree that it has to be damage specifically. Here:

The current #1 (at the time of me checking) speedrun on P11S. 3 Succors, 2 Adloquiums for Deploys. A 'dump skill' that is effectively 'Adlo, without the heal attached', a 550p OGCD singletarget shield (well Adlo is 540 but you get the point), would have allowed this player to gain at least 2 GCDs (replacing the Adlos) and depending on how Deploy lines up, possibly some of the Succors as well. I feel like ED is a shackle of the past that prevents the job from getting any new avenues to complexity. But I can see why people defend ED: because in the past when it's been removed, SE has replaced it with nothing. If we could be guaranteed that the complexity of minmaxing SCH would remain the same even after ED is removed, then I doubt as many complaints would arise.

I would agree that the 'MP regen tool' path is very bland and offers zero interplay with any of the rest of the kit, especially when we're already MP neutral-ish at base Piety. Maybe the shield idea would also have very quickly diminishing returns in casual content. I'm very conflicted about how I feel with the skill as it is. On one hand, it's a vital part of the job's optimization. On the other, it's been nerfed over and over to the point of irrelevance, but because it's even 1 potency of gained damage, we HAVE to keep it because 'its a vital part of the job's optimization'. I feel pretty weird about suggesting 'more healing' as the solution, but I do think that SCH having only one OGCD shielding option (Consolation) is very wonky for a supposed 'Barrier healer', so I think addressing that would be good.

I hope everyone who wants to remove Energy Drain never ever gets more than their 1 button spam healers until the day this game dies

The question then is, if SCH was reworked to be more complex, so complex it requires a degree in aerospace engineering to understand, but Energy Drain is removed as a consequence 'because it no longer meshes with the new design', is that okay? Or is it that Energy Drain as a skill must remain, regardless of everything else?

[GrimGale]

So which is it?

I don't know really. I'm all for choices honestly but I understand the appeal of a linear progression where you stack up resources and spend them all up in a spectacular an iconic spell. (Though the MMO progression and the constant "extension" of our kits doesn't seem to fit this particular structure as once you reach your iconic finisher what the hell do you add later? You end up in a Red Mage situation where your "grand finish" keeps diluting more and more into a stream of red nonsense.)

But then again, we're not talking about a burst damage rotation so healer sets should probably expand "horizontally" where you give them more choices to fit into different situations. In that sense, Scholar Energy Drain fits perfectly into the "gameplay of choices"- Unfortunately 90% of the time the "correct" choice is always DPS.

[Sebazy]

Barely lukewarm take:

SE have tried repeatedly to remove Energy Drain and have always ended up adding it back in because of design/validation errors and community pushback.

Its current implementation is deliberately sterile and on the verge of being a pointless button specifically so that when they do inevitably remove it yet again with Dawntrail, few will mourn it's current incarnation's passing.

At best it stays as is through sheer disinterest on SE's part, at worst it disappears with no spender or alternative added to take it's place. Fingers crossed Yoshida proves me wrong on this one, but I'm not hopeful.

[Zolvolt]

Barely lukewarm take:
At best it stays as is through sheer disinterest on SE's part, at worst it disappears with no spender or alternative added to take it's place. Fingers crossed Yoshida proves me wrong on this one, but I'm not hopeful.

Yeah I thought this in sh.b and still think it now but sch is fine without energy drain in it's current design. It's not ideal because of overcapping but at least PF scholars wouldn't ignore excog and indom during prog anymore. That being said it eventually would have to be overhauled on some level for the design to actually be good and enjoyable.

[Renathras]

I have stated multiple times in multiple places that the best course of action is to approach all angles, not just one. Start with a reboot to the healer role designed to have moments of glory in their gameplay in all forms of content, let players get comfortable with those changes, then gradually introduce more and more frequent instances of damage across all difficulty modes until we find a sweet spot that feels comfortable for the average player while offering more for the experienced healer. And now we have variant dungeons which are a great space to experiment with that kind of dungeon boss difficulty.

Honestly, 4 Healers Model + Criterion system (if they actually add a hard mode instead of "MSQ, Savage, and Savage but worse") is probably the ticket. Though I do think we need a reboot of the role - but this also requires a reboot of encounter design. It needs to be top down and not just the one or the other. The two issues right now are (1) all the healers play the same or close enough to matter (so people that don't like it have no "out") and (2) that the healer kits and encounter design do not work well together, and particularly the encounter design disincentivizes healing outside of critical/necessary healing only, which can be covered by the oGCD suite.

Encounter design needs to be changed, oGCDs need to be changed, healer damage kits need to be differentiated from each other (note that "leaving one as it is now" would accomplish this if the other three changed), healer healing kits need to be rebalanced (right now, GCD healing outside of Cure 1/Regen is MP negative and can't even be sustained if someone wanted to - go twack a target dummy then start casting only Cure 2, Medica 2, and Cure 3 and see how long your MP pool sustains for...) in both MP costs and potencies, oGCDs need to be reebalanced in potencies and CDs (and possibly charge systems in some cases, Assize comes to mind).

It really needs a top-down/bottom-up "spare no expenses" approach. I'm not even worried about "moments of glory" (I prefer "unsung hero" and am more amenable to that irl as well as in games - "When you do things right, people won't know you've done anything at all." -"God", Futurama)

I agree that the variable difficulty of Criterion - if they actually get 4 modes right - would be a great start, though.

Energy Drain, the thing people want removed when its here and returned when its gone.

Patch 7.0 patch notes:

And each time it's removed, we rediscover just how empty Scholar feels without it.

Energy Drain has been renamed to Shrodinger's Drain. Its state depends on who is observing it.
[SCH doesn't feel "empty" without it, it just makes AF feel weird since Soil and Excog have CDs.]

A 'dump skill' that is effectively 'Adlo, without the heal attached', a 550p OGCD singletarget shield (well Adlo is 540 but you get the point), would have allowed this player to gain at least 2 GCDs (replacing the Adlos) and depending on how Deploy lines up, possibly some of the Succors as well. I feel like ED is a shackle of the past that prevents the job from getting any new avenues to complexity.

I've said since 5.1 or 5.2 (whenever they added it back in ShB) that SCH should have an oGCD shield instead. A single target barrier is legitimately never "wasted" since you can always find at least once or twice a minute a good time to shield the MT if literally no one else (and it can be used to clutch save others in other situations), and it was stupid to me that SCH, the OG barrier healer, was the only healer without an oGCD or instant cast barrier (back when nAST had an instant cast Adlo and WHM had Benison). It's STILL stupid to me that, with the addition of a new healer, SCH STILL doesn't have this...but SGE has like three of them (Ham, Panham, and Holos)

[Shurrikhan]

Yes, I'm also not a massive fan of overhealing via Druochole on myself just to sustain my MP. But the point is, that there's SOMEthing that keeps 'spend your Addersgall and don't overcap' happening, even if the fight doesn't demand those Galls to be spent. Energy Drain is in a paradoxical situation, where it is somehow both 'the only vestiges of depth left on healers' and also 'this means you can't use your OGCD heals because they're a damage loss'. If Lilies being 100p of damage lost per cast in 5.0-5.5 (4 Glares being 1200p, Misery being 900, 300 lost total/100 per Lily) was such an issue that it had to be rectified, why is Energy Drain, which causes the same potency loss when a heal is used in place of it, getting a pass?

Simply put? Because (A) the implications depend on tuning and (B) the relationship is inverted.

For Energy Drain to be an outright punishment, it must have less sustain available than other healers if any Energy Drains are cast. Else, SCH just becomes faintly less susceptible to waste of resources during low damage intake than are other healers.

On the other hand, to access its core resource at all (not just the lowest priority fallback filler among several spenders), WHM uniquely had to lose damage. While that, too, could have been compensated for with Glare buffs instead or just faint damage buffs across the board (5 more Glare potency, 20 more Misery potency, etc.), since Lilies were a CD and literally the answer simultaneously to the burst healing, net-MP-generating, and mobility CDs of other jobs (none of which cost damage to use except in that rare case of having literally nothing else to heal on SCH via a pitiful Energy Drain), it made sense for Lilies, too, not to cost damage.

Personally, I much preferred Energy Drain back in the likes of ARR/HW where MP could be an actual concern and therefore Energy Drain might make the difference between being able to repeatedly Adlo a Weakened ally (back when it reduced Vitality/HP, too) to keep them alive through raidwides or not, but I just don't see what issue anyone would have with ED so long as SCH isn't undertuned.

At present, it's too weak to represent a real choice, instead only a way not to be wasteful when at absolutely no other use for AF (as an extra GCD from either of you will likely triple in loss what ED gains, and at greater MP cost). Even if it were more impactful enough to be a real choice, it'd be just one more form of dynamism, allowing for a little more variance between jobs and/or one more means of engagement and responsiveness -- being able to choose in the moment between offense and sustain.

[Raikai]

I'll add something else:

Since Astrologian is getting a rework, we'll see different things for sure. I don't know whether or not this is easy to execute as an idea, but something like a 'different Play' action, that is meant to be used solo, to bring AST's dps a bit more on par with the other 3 healers at the same situation. I know we can swap jobs whenever, but I feel we shouldn't just to be competitive with the others on a basic scale of solo capabilities (or be forced to level a new job just for that matter). Kind of the same way I wish that DNC got something like a 'Closed Position II' that was usable on themselves. Not asking to add SAM potential there, but something a bit less jarring in the dps output.

[Supersnow845]

I'll add something else:

Since Astrologian is getting a rework, we'll see different things for sure. I don't know whether or not this is easy to execute as an idea, but something like a 'different Play' action, that is meant to be used solo, to bring AST's dps a bit more on par with the other 3 healers at the same situation. I know we can swap jobs whenever, but I feel we shouldn't just to be competitive with the others on a basic scale of solo capabilities (or be forced to level a new job just for that matter). Kind of the same way I wish that DNC got something like a 'Closed Position II' that was usable on themselves. Not asking to add SAM potential there, but something a bit less jarring in the dps output.

I’ve always said they should return cleric stance as a solo action that turns your heals into damage oGCD’s to make the healers somewhat interesting during the MSQ or during solo duties

[IDontPetLalas]

I’ve always said they should return cleric stance as a solo action that turns your heals into damage oGCD’s to make the healers somewhat interesting during the MSQ or during solo duties

I said that a long time ago (i.e. re-examine cleric stance), having had a similar skill in another game. Mind you, in that game it could be applied to either solo or group encounters. It was an instant cast skill that could buff the healer's damage, during which time healing skills were reduced by a certain %. It could also be instantly toggled off, so that healing skills were returned to full. The toggle had a very short CD (10 seconds). So, even if someone hit it by mistake, it could easily and quickly be corrected.

[Shurrikhan]

I’ve always said they should return cleric stance as a solo action that turns your heals into damage oGCD’s to make the healers somewhat interesting during the MSQ or during solo duties

I wouldn't hate that, since I'd actually be adding to the job's available actions instead of existing only to prune one half or the other at a time.

Though it would also seem jarring and painfully excessive.

First time in group instance: "Wait, what happened to my 20 attacks?"