Dreaming of a Solution to SCH's Fairy AI

[NocturniaUzuki]

For anyone who has ever played SCH, I would imagine that you have struggled to deal with the fairy AI. There are various roundabout methods of manipulating her to do what you want, and the addition of Few Union has helped greatly in 70+ content.

Personally, though, I still avoid playing SCH - largely out of frustration with the fairy AI.

So what would people like as a solution? As the title suggests, feel free to dream here. Your suggestions do not necessarily need to be realistic for the developers. Just tell us what you wish the system was like!

[NocturniaUzuki]

Recently, I've wondered whether it would be possible for them to bring the Gambit system from FF12 into play in FF14. The Gambit system was one of FF12's great successes, and being able to manually dictate our fairy's action priorities and the specifics of when she executes them by means of a detailed collection of preset commands, like in the Gambit system, I think we could really customize her to match whatever situation we faced. Being able to "swap" between two ot the Gambit sets on the fly, much like FF13 paradigms, would be great as well, if for a specific section of a fight you wanted her to forgo a particular command you set as a general rule.

[KDSilver]

The fairy's AI is good now.
Most issues have already been adressed in past patches.
She's far more reactive than before.

[Risvertasashi]

Fairy AI... or more specifically responsiveness... has improved massively.

[Eloah]

The fairy's AI is exactly like the gambit system it's just we have no control over it/we don't see it. The main factor is distance and certain percentages. But the list is something like this; you are always first, then her to a certain degree, then the rest of your party based on their distance and percentage threshold. The only issue that pops up every now and again is when the thresholds clash a bit. Like let's say the percentage threshold is 80% and 50%, and the distance is 10-15. If a DPS has 75% and a tank has 51% but the tank is at 16 distance while the DPS is in the 10-15 range, she'll heal the DPS first, even though the tank would be the top priority, for us. It's not perfect but it's way better than it was.

[NocturniaUzuki]

Well, the trigger time on her abilities is certainly a lot faster than it was in the past, but when you compare the control we have over our own abilities compared to the control we have over our fairies, there is a massive difference. It's not just a matter of the response time to command entry.

The main issue with her as it stands is how she decides who to target, and when she decides to heal. If the party takes damage that puts them below certain thresholds, she will start prioritizing low priority targets over high priority ones. I'm sure you already know this. Like if the party takes raid-wide damage. Obviously, as a shield healer, SCH is largely about preventing damage, but heavy enough damage is, of course, going to still leave the party low. At this point, we cast a regen effect like Whispering Dawn. However, despite that being the only healing non-tanks need to recover, and despite there being no threat to a random DPS, the fairy will start healing DPS who she deems a higher priority than the tank, who may need her healing to maintain high health leading into a tank buster.

There are ways around this, like manipulating her choices by re-positioning her, but this can lead to getting her killed or knocked back in various ways due to having to be in front of the boss in order to be closer to the tank than the DPS (not to mention this may put her out of position for her AoE casts). Controlling the fairy in full manual also becomes overbearing very quickly, having to not only deal with our own rotations and spellcasts, but also manually recasting Embrace every 3 seconds while trying to re-position the fairy for upcoming mechanics. Given that we already have to enter our own DPS casts every ~2 seconds, if we add trying to flick to the tank, click our Embrace hotkey, then flick back to the boss to recast Ruin/Broil, all within a constantly-changing window that overlaps due to the 2:3 cast time ratio, this gets ridiculous. This is largely why people resort to macroing Embrace to Broil, or macroing the Embrace hotkey to always target the tank, but then that comes with its own issues.

Of course, this was a large part of the reason for the addition of Fey Union, which allows us to simply hit an instant-cast button and force her to focus on our selected target. However, in classic SQEXFF14 fashion, they neglected to consider how this would affect older content. The reason they appear not to care about that is down to the players' lack of interest in old content, I suppose, but let's not get into that can of worms here. Anyways, a major rework of her AI system to introduce powerful player control options would not only be a QoL fix for 70+ content as SCH, it would also largely fix the sub-70 issues.

[NocturniaUzuki]

If I had to list what I'd like to see in detail, it would go something like this:

- The ability to create place a "tether" point for Lily. This would come with a new pet movement command: Heel to Tether. When executed, Lily would move to the tether location. We could recreate tether points either at will, or with a low cooldown, similar to turrets. This would allow us to quickly and easily move her to and from pre-designated locations by using both Heel commands in conjunction and using our own positioning to efficiently bounce her around with precision on the fly.

- The ability to manage Lily's priority system. I mentioned this in my post above, but something like the Gambit system would be lovely. Especially if we could have 2 or 3 Gambit sets that we could swap around at will during the fight. Being able to change her AI ourselves with preset options, the most important of which would be having her always prioritize the main tank unless otherwise ordered to. Having our Embrace macros register before her base AI would help as well, since manually entering Embrace casts does crap all if she's already decided to start casting on someone else. Generally, we want to manually heal non-tank targets or people who accidentally take hits. Having her automatically start healing them is an annoyance which then forces us to start spamming Physick on the tank, depending on the fight in question (newer raids tend to have pathetic AA damage).

Finally, I always approach things from a solo healing perspective, because that is where healers' entire kits really matter. In a duo heal situation, Lily going AWOL isn't really such an issue. There's an extra healer there covering slack. If you have a regen healer they can just cast a regen on the main tank, and then it's a non-issue. Not to mention, in most pug duo heal runs, regens serve no purpose due to the excessive overhealing that goes on. Even if one healer is trying to be efficient, the second often insists that everyone must be at 100% HP at all times - in pugs, at least. In statics, maybe less so, but even then, with two oGCD heals to call on for almost every raidwide, DPS and Healer health bars generally won't stay below Lily's priority threshold for very long, if at all.

[Gemina]

I don't have much issues with Fairy AI. They are essentially a regen that extend the available ogcds for the SCH to use between gcds. Just try to properly place her and let her do her thing. My issue is more with Fey Union, which surprisingly I have only found use for in dungeons. I don't do savage, so it could be more useful in a static with a trusted co healer, but the average PUG healer in 8-man eliminates my need for it, unless they're KO'd.

What I would like I have mentioned more times than I can count. And that is to combine the faeries, and give us access to all the abilities between Eos and Selene. Also to replace Silent Dusk with something more useful.

[NocturniaUzuki]

The fairy's AI is exactly like the gambit system it's just we have no control over it/we don't see it. The main factor is distance and certain percentages. But the list is something like this; you are always first, then her to a certain degree, then the rest of your party based on their distance and percentage threshold. The only issue that pops up every now and again is when the thresholds clash a bit. Like let's say the percentage threshold is 80% and 50%, and the distance is 10-15. If a DPS has 75% and a tank has 51% but the tank is at 16 distance while the DPS is in the 10-15 range, she'll heal the DPS first, even though the tank would be the top priority, for us. It's not perfect but it's way better than it was.

I must admit I rarely play SCH these days, for a number of reasons. I can't remember if you were the one that responded to me in my thread where I brought up T9 solo healing. Specifically 4-player Synced T9, but anyways...

The issue seems to stem from the fact that they use percentages. Since tanks take low damage percent from raid-wide AoEs, they are always high HP after most raid-wides, whereas the rest of the party is very low. In these situations, she will tend to start healing non-tanks, even though we want her to focus the tank while regens take care of the party. In the other thread, it was suggested that I position her closer to the tank to manipulate her AI, but the issue there is that in order to reliably get her closer to the tank but further from the DPS, I would want her in front of the boss with the tank, where she will get killed.


Though thinking about it now, I may be able to do something using micropositioning. That would involve my entire party being conscious and able to manage their own position relative to Lily, though.

However, if there is a threshold where she will always focus someone, that is an issue. In the 4-player T9 example, Thermionic Beam leaves everyone but the tank at ~10% or less, through shields and Fey Covenant. The tank, meanwhile, gets nuked down to around 40-50%. Even if Lily is closer to the tank, it would appear that she heals the DPS. So unless I put her out of range of the DPS, I can't isolate the tank as the target.

To put it bluntly, I suppose she's like a new healer that panics when she sees someone at low health and focuses attention on them, despite there being no rush. That's how I feel about it, anyways.

[Kabooa]

I would prefer it if the Faerie acted as a visual indicator of otherwise permanent effects.

'Embrace' - Faerie sticks to the target and provides them a moderate perma hot.
'Place' - Faerie goes to target location and puts up a healing AoE zone.

Sure, she's not really a pet then, but you can do more interesting stuff with her (Which is what they've been doing anyways via Dissipation and Union)