Personal Crashout about scholar and astrologian

[Reginald_Cain]

1. Let me preface by saying ive only been playing since 2017 and wasnt around for much of hw or any of arr being current. That being said i fell in love with the stormblood iterations of these jobs, especially scholar.

2. I am not someone who enjoys playing healer to ONLY heal. I like having the ability to heal when needed and i like having a full party res on my lb3. What i loved about stormblood job design was that every healer kind of played like a dps with just enough healing tools to keep your party alive.

Now for the crashout
Come shadowbringers a VOCAL subset of player moaned and whined about not healing enough and wanting to only heal on healer. What the devs did in response was gut ALL of our interesting dps kits and made all healers just press 1 button and refresh a dot. It felt like garbage and it still does. We got a ton of shiny new heal ogcd's that we DONT NEED TO USE in most casual content (aka 99% of the fudging game) and it made the difficulty jump from casual to harder content like savage even worse for unexperienced healers who weren't used to using their full kit.

This problem became exacerbated in Endwalker when tanks got insane healing skills that made healers more irrelevant in normal dungeon content.

[Reginald_Cain]

The part that gets me ticked off is we have nothing to do now when we aren't healing and the devs have no desire to address that just like how they refuse to address the ZERO COHESION of machinists aoe kit. Healers still have no actual damage rotation and machinist still cant reset ogcd's with autocrossbow and its been 3 FUDGING EXPANSIONS!

Depending on what content I run the healer role feels either insanely boring or just super stressful because i struggle with targeting different party members for single target heals quickly on controller. the latter thing is a skill issue i know but the first part just feel unnacceptably bad.

I get the logic is healing is hard so we made dpsing easier but that feels so backwards for making the role accessible and appealing to new players. I would much prefer stronger and fewer heals and an actual dps rotation over this garbage. The amount of people asking the devs to make the role heal more makes me want to just quit the role forever because it just sucks and has sucked just as bad for 3 expansions now.

Now we can talk about astrologian because i almost forgot.

1. bring sects back. we are prolly gonna get a new healer or tank next expansion or the one after so we'll be back to an odd number. I don't see why we HAD to FORCE astro to be a pure healer EXCLUSIVELY when a lot of its player base (my friends and I included xD) prefered nocturnal sect most of the time.

2. im glad the cards have different effects again but the job is still boring and lacks flavor.
3. Malefic and combust feel incredibly limp as damage buttons and the animations suck imo.

4. oracle is cool but it can only be used every two minutes. same with scholars Baneful Impaction.

Sticking more damage buttons in healer kits was a step in the right direction this expansion but forcing them to only be usable every 2 minutes and only in MAX LEVEL CONTENT does little to address how boring healer dps kits are at lower levels or outside 2 minute bursts.

Baneful impaction could get replaced with BANE to spread biolysis or scholar could simply get both so we have more than 1 dot again.

Eukrasian Dosis And Eukrasion Dykrasia dot's should stack so sage THE DPS HEALER gets something more to do besides spam dosis and plegma

oracle should be tied to draw and not divination

white mage ironically feels ok since they get lilies and glare iv gets presssed 4 times during the 2 minute burst unlike the once and done buttons the other healers have. If i were to change white mage id give it the gunbreaker treatment and just lower the cd on pressence of mind to 1 minute instead. Maybe id give back aero 3 so they get more to do in dungeons.

I know some folks will hate a lot of my suggestions but i felt the need to express my dissatisfaction and desires for the healer role.

[Alice_Rivers]

It does seem a little anathema to me that they should remove healer dps in ShB in the name of giving more healing and then immediately afterwards remove that healing by giving tanks a load of self heals. For me I'm all for healer kits existing in their current form, that is as toolkits I can grab a tool from and use it without harming my dps. My problem in principle is that I don't get to use that toolkit for the most part unless something goes horribly wrong.

In terms of what you suggest for AST, I would absolutely love to see AST's kit revolve around cards, drawing, redrawing, modifying, so on and so forth. Thematically that sounds really cool and very distinct from the other healers buuuuuut the dev team seems to be at war with that concept.

[Aelin_Ashryver]

Tank sustain needs cut severely, you can run with no healers too easily in most content. I will forever miss STB astro u.u Current astro is still preferable to me over EW one though.

[Carighan]

Tank sustain needs cut severely, you can run with no healers too easily in most content. I will forever miss STB astro u.u Current astro is still preferable to me over EW one though.

I feel it's not the sustain, but both the damage and the recovery speed. Comparing why so many self-healing and support-healing abilities work in other MMORPGs but not here, what becomes clear is:

- Everyone in FFXIV dies very fast if hit.
- Tanks in particular die extremely fast from boss ability hits in FFXIV.
- On the flipside, everyone, including in particular again tanks, re-heals awfully fast and requires very little time and/or mana investment to get back up.

If tanks needed 10-15 hits to die but also would take 20-30 seconds to bring back up to 100% from 5% HP and also deplete a healer's manabar in the process, we'd have lots of room for self-healing abilities in tanks. Consider in the current environment what if tanks took 3x as much damage, but had 30x (!) as much health as they do now (and Benediction healed for 100% of the caster's HP or so :P ). You could stand in sooooo many abilites. But once you're low, it takes a single healer 20-30 GCDs worth of heals to re-heal you, if not longer. So better plan your defensive CDs and self-healing to assst with that!

That's of course a ludicrous and intentionally over-exaggerated example, but it's just to convey the general idea.