How Energy Drain and Aetherflow healing should work.

[Saefinn]

I think it feels "punishing" because they already stripped us naked of many of our DPS abilities. But actually Energy Drain is a dump if you have excess aetherflow and not as intended as part of your core DPS rotation, but does add a little to our DPS. As awful as it is our DPS rotation is pretty much:

Broil->Ruin II with the occassional Biolysis and Energy Drain (on the condition we have an excess, or if you're playing to risk/reward to boost your deeps a little more, but ED doesn't add a lot).

I don't think the solution to the problem has anything to do with Energy Drain or aetherflow, it is more "give us back more to do in our downtime".

And actually, I personally advocate more risk/reward mechanics for SCH, in that we have more dual purpose where we might sacrifice healing potential for DPS potential and to do more with the DPS, because I think it plays more to the tactical feel of a SCH and the idea of enhancing/using abilities differently depending on the situation. It means we can get better use out of more skills in our downtime, more heal focus may sacrifice DPS, but that's the case when you have more of a focus on healing anyway.

One of my suggested changes to SCH is to get more mileage out of existing spells by allowing skill like Deployment Tactics and Emergency tactics and faerie choice affects how certain skills are used, where a healing spell could be changed for more utility or DPS, or a DPS spell to do something slightly different (eg. Biolysis dumps all damage at once, akin to Thunder procs on BLM). This adds more risk/reward, but adds to the tactical feel (which SCH is supposed to have) and gives us more out of our downtime without taking up more space on our bars and sees more use of skills we're not touching in our downtime, but you have to make your choice in a heal focus. Because for a lot of content, we're not actually seeing much use of our healing abilities and in content where we do, we have periods/sections where we aren't.