Quote Originally Posted by Volkaj View Post
AF was for sure a core component of SCH healing back in SB, but as I've mentioned in that other thread that took several hits in ShB (Seraph, Fey Blessing, Recitation). The important part that tied (and still ties) everything together was ED. Otherwise AF tools had no cost, and were basically WHM Lilies with a different charge mechanism and no Misery payoff.

As for SMN I have to admit I've never played the job. To me it seemed like AF was the starting point of the whole summoning loop: use AF abilities and trances to unlock Bahamut and then Phoenix. In that light making ED give AF makes perfect sense.

I personally believe making AF a DPS CD to unlock your healing abilities would be a bad idea, but we are in agreement that AF healing/DPS management should absolutely be a key part of the core SCH loop. New AF-based DoTs would be really nice, for instance.
In 5.0 the only thing ACN/SMN aetherflow is for is Fester and Painflare, that's it, there is absolutely no other interaction with the toolkit. In 3.0 and 4.0 you converted Aetherflow stacks into stacks that you used to activate Dreadwyrm trance. Which they removed in favor of making DWT a straight cooldown.

And I believe where we differ is in how aetherflow itself would be used. I'm personally content with energy Drain being the go to dps skill for dumping aetherflow. If I had to add something I'd probably re-implement Shadow Flare and tweak its potencies where it's worse then energy Drain in single target but a gain in AoE. Like I mentioned in a previous thread. What i personally would like to see is your dps spells helping you build fae guage and a new dps skill to serve as a dump for the excess with restrictions on it. While I did throw together my concepts with some thought I'm ultimately not a game dev so I can't claim to know how to execute it completely.