Scholar Aetherflow Issues

[EaMett]

And when I play WHM I often wish I had some way to dump my lilies on dps, too. Alternately, I'd love it if the lily gauge filled up based on dps done, rather than just over time, like the blood lily fills based on healing. This would make a lovely synergy between the healing and dps components of the class, I feel.

It's technically DPS. Because of how you build up to misery each healing skill can be considered as a 225 potency dps skill. So if you're going to use and ogcd (bene, tetra, DB, assize) weaving it into an afflatus skill is a DPS gain over clipping your glare even if you just use it overhealing a random target.
If you're runing around and can't dps you can also just burn your lilie stacks and it's equivalent to having a 225pot instant dps skill so long as you use misery.

To me, sch right now is just a class that has a bunch of minor inconveniences that individually aren't that bad, but together they add up in a way that makes the class less than enjoyable to play.

Some really impact the gameplay and optimization though. Ruin II in it's current iteration is such a pain to use, it's just not fun. It pushed you into using ogcds in pairs or otherwise clipping your GCD. The later is obviously crazy clunky and doesn't feel right, because 1- clipping sucks, 2- muscle memory is a bitch when unlearning something. The former although it's an optimization opportunity, is just a pain to deal with in it's current iteration because you need to evaluate the true value of your second weave on the spot. Things like "well I can gain from placing SS over the tank anyways" is a falacious thought process because you're basically taking a dps loss for something that may not be necessary. Especially if you party with a WHM (which you most likely will) as they NEED to spend assize and afflatus skills on a regular basis.
It'll work just fine when we sit down and spreadsheet our CD use with our party but that's a lot of trouble for something that could be fixed with a potency tweak. Especially considering WHM afflatus skills work propperly for this purpose AND heal (healing aspect is normal since it's gated behind ressources, but just saying).

Not having a stack dump is a HUGE inconvenience. It completely removes the risk/reward aspect of the gameplay. Having one would make things more fun, allow for a bit more optimization, fix dissipation in a single target scenario, fix the weaving issues we have. Things like not having anything to weave which feels horrible, or helping make ruin II more relevant by giving you the option to stack dump into your single weaves to make ruin a dps gain and not a loss. etc..

AF out of combat can't even be compared to the comfort of say.. being able to control seraph embrace to target the mt, or even correcting some of the bugs with fairy skills going on CD but never hitting the party. AF out of combat is so low down the list.