How are Faeries right now?

[Tolmos]

I took a several month hiatus from the game, and recently found myself wanting to come back. There are many reasons this game stood out to me, but the biggest reason was the Scholar.

The first thing I noticed was that I could no longer cast Embrace while in "sic" mode. This was a painful thing to note. :-\ The second thing, which has given me trepidation about entering a dungeon until I know for sure, was that many forum posts mentioned that Faeries had become broken in sic mode, waiting an upwards of 1-1.5 seconds PAST Embrace's cast timer to recast the spell.

If the latter is true, that's really disheartening. The biggest draw for me was this class and its pet, and it would be extremely disappointing to hear that the faerie has been reduced to just another dumb MMO pet that has to be micromanaged 100%, instead of the 50% or so from release.

So what's the current status of the Faerie in the game? Did they fix the 1-1.5 second lag between embraces, or is that intentional?

[ManaKeKz]

To be honest, I don't know. I've grouped my Embrace heals into a macro with Physik or Adloquium (Em on <mo>, Phys/Adlo on <t> so I can choose to use Em manually on same target, diff target or not at all), so when I really do want my Embrace to be used, I pull out Eos on Obey. Anytime I don't need the extra healing I use Selene on fire and forget mode (Sic). She cycles through buffs correctly now and still heals the tank reliably when placed somewhere near them.
I never really paid attention to Embrace recasts, like I said, if I need them spammed on CD, I do so by macro.

[Pence]

Scholar and Whitemage are currently very balanced, and compliment each other awesomely. (Probably one of my greatest praises of XIV; balance')

Both Seline and Eos can easily solo heal the current HM's while you DPS full time (SR you can partially DPS) if i90.

TBH....if you don't want to micro-manage a lot.... play WHM, quit healing in XIV, or quit XIV.

[Silkerin]

the way the pets are done right now, you dont need to micro manage then except on very situational scenarios... for fairies like eos only before/after a big hit for the whole group you will really need any other skills than embrace, and that she does herself pretty well already. and if you know that will happen at some point you can just save the skills to use when they are needed, becuase only embrace is the thing you will want to use all the time, and she already does it automatically at some % of hp...

same goes for summoner egis, you will really only need their main basic atack, wihch they already use on obey, the other are very situational, like aoe damage, buffs, debuffs and stuns... again.. i woudl rather save those than wasting at somepoint.. like using the eegis aoe on one single enemy, feels like a waste.

if you cant stand waiting for eos to only cast embrace on a party member around 80 70% hp, you can just macro embrace and force her to use it yourlsef. I never noticed that wait time on sic *i never use sic so..* but if thats true, i think its by choice, to reinforce the idea that a player controle pet is better than leting it do their thing by themselves, they were very open saying that they dont want a gambit system like ff12, that makes the character play by themselves, so having a fairy being that good doing stuff by herself would go against that idea they had.

[MrDiezel]

Sounds like your problem was you were expecting the Fairy to carry the fight in heals... on Sic mode. Use obey and macro pet skills to your regular skills and you should have little problem.

Though I personally think faeries (Eos) are great since they can literally heal an entire low lvl dungeon (before you get to Cutter's Cry)

[Espon]

I generally keep Eos on Obey since her cooldowns are more powerful when controlled.

For Selene it depends on what I'm doing and how lazy I'm feeling. One thing I like about having Selene on Sic is that she'll cycle her speed buffs every 30 seconds on her own, however that prevents you from directing her heals and properly utilizing her silence. I tend to forget to hit her speed buffs on Obey and 30 second macros don't work well enough since hitting a different macro will stop it.

[Ninix]

You probably remember 2.0 fairies, where you could manually place them in a specific spot and they would spam the shit out of Embrace like some kind of crazy healing autoturret or something. This was actually a bug, and when I look at old videos of my early Coil fights I can see exactly why. When placed, Eos would start casting her next Embrace almost immediately after the first one finished. The problem with this is that the cast time on Embrace is 2 seconds, and the Recast time is 3 seconds, so while Placed she was actually clipping her Recast timer by almost a full second which is why it seemed so insanely good.

In 2.1 they fixed that bug, but they seem to have gone a little too hard in the other direction and now she seems not to auto-cast Embrace until about a half second after the Recast timer completes, essentially giving her a 3.5 second Recast on Embrace instead of the (effectively) 2 second one she had in 2.0.

As a trade-off, manual pet control has been greatly improved, and we can also control pet actions in macros. So you can put her on Obey and she won't blow all of her cooldowns anymore and you have full control over everything (though she will still occasionally auto-cast Embrace if you're not giving her orders).

I do miss the crazy roided-up Eos from 2.0 but I would miss having the macros so much more.

[JonFarron]

They greatly improved the fairy functions. Macros win over ANYTHING. If you macro Embrace to AT LEAST Adloquium and Leeches, that's already good enough.

Personally, I have Embrace macrod into all of my heals. Physick, Adlo, Leeches, and Lustrate. Some people don't like macroing it into Physick because she'll auto top-off people you're not healing. Pre-2.2, she was like, on drugs or something. Difficult to control and like spazzing out Embraces 24/7. The best way to describe her auto heals before the patch would probably be:

Eos before 2.2 : EMBRACEEMBRACEEMBRACEEMBRACEEMBRACE NEED MORE HEALZ OMGZ WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!! *Panic attack and blows all CDs*

Eos after 2.2 : Embrace. Embrace. Embrace. *Embrace on your target with a macro* Embrace. She'll still blow all her cooldowns, but having her on manual is sooo much better because of macros.

Selene has also been improved greatly. I learned to manually use her buffs before 2.2, but now she casts them automatically after the other ends, so having her on auto isn't bad at all.

[Wadoka]

Next up, to expand on PLACE, I would like to see FOLLOW - so you could select the MT, tell her to follow, and have her stick with that player no matter how they moved.

[Assirra]

Next up, to expand on PLACE, I would like to see FOLLOW - so you could select the MT, tell her to follow, and have her stick with that player no matter how they moved.

Now that is just straight up being lazy. She already does everything else on her own.