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.

[Azurarok]

I tried to play AST for a bit today and remembered why I put the globe down, it's just not the same without the card RNG.

I never played StB AST and I'm sure people missed varied card effects but there's really just nothing I like about having consistent sets of oGCDs coming around every minute, especially when most of the effects are redundant with the rest of the job's toolkit.


Also miss Nocturnal Sect still.

[Shistar]

I do not mind the static cards per se, but I really do miss Nocturnal Sect. If you get WHM + AST, it's just kind of annoying honestly...
I also find it dumb that, despite SGE being put in the shield healer group, it has way too many heals. Coincidentally, AST lost its shield stance when SGE was introduced, so as an AST main it really felt like they were taking my favorite part of the job and putting it in an ugly futuristic package.


AST and SGE could be two sides of the same coin (hybrid healers that lean more strongly towards one side) and I think both can totally coexist with both AST sects, even with the regen/shield distinction.


AST will get reworked in the next expansion either way, so I just hope it's not as bad as EW AST.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Sect removal was absolutely unnecessary and I will die on that hill. It's just a frail excuse to strengthen their reasoning to create a waste of design space that is SGE and their weird obsession for Regen+Barrier dichotomy.

[...]I also find it dumb that, despite SGE being put in the shield healer group[...]

Title: "Barrier Healer"
Looks inside: "Oops, all regens."

[Carighan]

Sect removal was absolutely unnecessary and I will die on that hill. It's just a frail excuse to strengthen their reasoning to create a waste of design space that is SGE and their weird obsession for Regen+Barrier dichotomy.

Of course from a healer perspective it's negative, but interestingly enough other roles need such a split more than ever. We have too many classes with too little usable design space, so most classes play ~identical to every other one in their role, often (tanks, healers) being able to use near-identical hotbar layouts which highlights how much of their nature is fully shared and just superficially different in performative amounts.

That is to say, maybe tanks would be better off with a split into MTs and OTs. MTs are better at surviving themselves, OTs at protecting others. Maybe melee DPS need to be split into more staticky and more mobile melee DPS, one has more tools to survive greeding into the odd AoE, the other to avoid them and keep pressure up from brief ranged stints (compare Viper and the out+in of Reapers with their two ranged GCDs). Etc etc.

Sadly as much as I bemoan the current healer split (as unnecessary, they could have 4 entirely different healers easily with very little comparability between them), it's almost inevitable then. And it's not like other roles could be made all-unique, as FFXIV's combat system just relies on class having essentially 0 impact on fight performance as long as overall rDPS is balanced (hence why random cards of the old type had to go, too - they had too much of a total impact).

I guess one interim solution could be to allow Astro via Sect and one shield healer via... something... to swap their "role". Maybe the two more support-centric ones AST and SCH, while the more "pure" ones WHM and SGE remain in their role at all times.

[Shistar]

[...]That is to say, maybe tanks would be better off with a split into MTs and OTs.

I personally really dislike this take. Tanks are meant to take turns being MT, or swap temporarily as needed for mechanics. By forcing them to always be either MT or OT, you're removing a mechanic that the game uses very often, thus making tanks have even less stuff to do during fights. Unless you have any details on how tanks would benefit from this besides one having more survivability than the other? I'm interested to know, but my first reaction without more details is "please don't" :'D

I guess one interim solution could be to allow Astro via Sect and one shield healer via... something... to swap their "role". Maybe the two more support-centric ones AST and SCH, while the more "pure" ones WHM and SGE remain in their role at all times.

SGE is currently, although unofficially, a hybrid healer and considering it anything else is kind of a joke, honestly. The amount of heals and regens that job has makes no sense for a purely "shield" healer, especially when you compare it to SCH, then we're just making fun of the concept of shield/regen healer division as a whole...
Maybe with a toggle skill like Eukrasia that applies a buff to yourself (essentially your sect) that would toggle your kit between regen and mitigation, keeping SGE mostly the same skill-wise but only swapping what extra effect is applied. AST with sects would simply swap any regen effects with shields or mitigations as it used to have, is my guess.

Ideally, there would not be a forced distinction between healers and everyone would be able to adjust their kit slightly so double regen doesn't feel so silly. It'd make sense for certain healers to lean more intensely in one direction, but having a handful of skills that you can change would make it more fun, honestly.

As for your idea to divide DPS into sections, maybe our biggest section like melees could potentially benefit from this, but I struggle to see its use in both ranged sections. I think baking these features into the job itself, giving it a stronger identity doing so, would be cleaner overall and impose less on the player. How would you feel if your favorite job was put exclusively as the tank role you dislike, its stats swapped in a way you dislike—unable to withstand hits you could before, forced to interrupt your rotation in ways that don't feel natural to you, etc.? If they forced PLD (using it as an example because it's your set job in the forums) as MT-only and took away cover, the wings, the ranged nature of requiescat combo (one could argue MT has no reason to be losing uptime, thus doesn't need ranged skills as much) I would seriously dislike it. PLD is my favorite job because of these. Now, one could argue PLD would then be an OT-only, but being able to survive hits is part of a tank's way of protecting others.
Suddenly the game is imposing a lot of things on you about how you should play your job. I think the more freedom we have, the better, and reintroducing AST's sects would be a step towards giving players more agency over how things are handled.