Healers need an overhaul

[LeonKeyh]

Maybe I'm odd but I actually enjoy hitting the Aetherflow button a lot, making sure I don't let it drift is fun for me. I wish Energy Drain would refund MP again though, I don't really see a reason for that to have been taken off of it outside of them trying to give some relevance to Lucid Dreaming, which isn't fun to press. Oh, I also wish they would allow Aetherflow's usage outside of combat again, I would like to be able to use Lustrate and Soil inside cities and houses with friends.

While that definitely would be cool, I am fairly sure that they don't let it be used outside of combat as a means of stopping 30-40 second long pull timers (i.e. SCH hits Aetherflow at the beginning of a duty then they sit there and wait for it to get back).

There WERE a lot of "little" things like this that ultimately cause people who "need to do the most efficient thing" to do that were ridiculous. They really worked on removing a lot of those things (more recent one being Doton going away when you hide. Most efficient way to pull would have been to drop Doton and hide right before the pull and try to get the tank to put the boss in it. It's barely any gain at all, but it's "one of those things" that they did a good job at getting rid of.

[QooEr]

While that definitely would be cool, I am fairly sure that they don't let it be used outside of combat as a means of stopping 30-40 second long pull timers (i.e. SCH hits Aetherflow at the beginning of a duty then they sit there and wait for it to get back).

There WERE a lot of "little" things like this that ultimately cause people who "need to do the most efficient thing" to do that were ridiculous. They really worked on removing a lot of those things (more recent one being Doton going away when you hide. Most efficient way to pull would have been to drop Doton and hide right before the pull and try to get the tank to put the boss in it. It's barely any gain at all, but it's "one of those things" that they did a good job at getting rid of.

they could do it the sage way and make them start with 3 stacks of aetherflow. no, instead take away their ability to have fun in even ways that dont matter.

Honestly... why?

It effectively just punishes you further for downtime or holding charges for rapid burst, the latter of which is the only unique affordance Aetherflow-as-an-active-ability has to warrant what would otherwise be button bloat (by essentially giving you a cap of 6 charges, up from SGE's 3).

optimal aetherflow usage would just change. but thats not a punishment. having nuances to increase your dps by a small fraction is Not punishment for not playing optimally, its a reward for planning things well.

actual punishment is things like dropping enochian, or missing trick attack's buff because you missed a positional, or losing an edge of shadow because TBN didnt break.

By turning AF into an effectively 45s CD via 5s CDR per AF action, it's that much harder to align / find use for what so often amounts to excessive healing even among just your free kit.

wouldnt you just use energy drain more often instead of the useless healing?

it being harder to align means youd have to pay more attention to the timing. quickened aetherflow would also make things more interesting than now, because of the downtime implications. it would actually make scholar a lot more interesting than it is.

personally i feel that when everything in a jobs design is perfectly smooth and on rails, the job suffers for it because it takes away decision making and planning. its why i hate how every single thing nowadays is on a 120s cooldown; the jobs need to hold everyone's hand because people cant be trusted to use their neurons for extra damage that ultimately doesnt even matter outside of savage and ultimate.

[Shurrikhan]

they could do it the sage way and make them start with 3 stacks of aetherflow. no, instead take away their ability to have fun in even ways that dont matter.


optimal aetherflow usage would just change. but thats not a punishment. having nuances to increase your dps by a small fraction is Not punishment for not playing optimally, its a reward for planning things well.

I never said that having further nuances would be punishing. I love nuance. I simply, in looking at what opportunities and actual decision-making would come from it, do not see how Quickened Aetherflow in particular would have a net positive effect on that.

So let's look at how that lines up with what little optimization is available, let alone that which fits into 2min cycles. We'll assume no AF is needed for heals here:

Under the current 60s AF cycles, you blow 6 EDs in the first raid cycle between AF and Dis. You then reload AF at 60 seconds. You hold for up to some 2 seconds over recharge for raid buffs to pop, using a Swifted Broil and Biolysis to blow 3 EDs and reload AF in the second pair of oGCD slots. You then blow your remaining 3 EDs as quickly as you can as not to delay Dis. Blow them again.

Under Quickened Aetherflow, to get your alignment to work out you're all the more forced to use Dissipation on CD in order not to desync. You blow all at start, reload at 30 seconds (since you've spent 6, due to Dis), blow all, reload 45s prior to raid buffs, and do as before (blow all asap, drifting Aetherflow by roughly 3 seconds, which you can manage for roughly 4 raid cycles before loss). It essentially only feels decent when you're playing like Dissipation isn't a skill in itself, but simply your Aetherflow-part-2 that locks you out of fairy skills per raid cycle.

Granted, Dissipation practically that already, but that's also been a notable point of contention.

That seems less a further optimization space than just... a ball and chain. And that's before even getting into how your cycle can be desynced by ill-timed downtime, much like SMN's old Energy Drain.

it being harder to align means youd have to pay more attention to the timing. quickened aetherflow would also make things more interesting than now, because of the downtime implications. it would actually make scholar a lot more interesting than it is.

Don't get me wrong; I like downtime implications. But... they are only as interesting as they are deliberately recoverable -- i.e., if/when there are distinct options from which to pursue the best (or, if uniquely hurt by downtime, the least bad).

Taking 4+ raid cycles (8+ minutes) to resync... in a 7-minute fight, or it being superior to just outright drop a full AF than remain desynced throughout, isn't nearly as "interesting" as it may first sound.

personally i feel that when everything in a jobs design is perfectly smooth and on rails, the job suffers for it because it takes away decision making and planning.

I agree completely. I just ask that you look concretely at the decision space it would provide. At present, it would seem to me like it'd more likely enforce pairings (thereby degrading options) more so than it would improve the number of actionable considerations SCH would work with.
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Edit: That's not to say there couldn't be other ways of handling this, to open up that decision space (and ideally create a greater number of viable decision paths, not just to add QoL) if one were dead-set on a CDR.

For instance (very rough spitball here), though it'd likely be too QoL-centric, perhaps Aetherflow could have, itself, 3 charges on a 20s CD each, consuming in a single animation as many charges as are available and wouldn't overcap. You'd have the CPM, and you'd have the effective 6 charges without quite so much disalignment issues (for better or worse).

Or, you could even attach an Ebb and Flow mechanic to Aetherflow itself, whereby it offers a % bonus to its spenders that fades or rises over time, alternating. Now, per 20 seconds, you could set it up to rise to a bonus before burst or fall from it, attempting to max out the 5s window on each side.

[QooEr]

Don't get me wrong; I like downtime implications. But... they are only as interesting as they are deliberately recoverable -- i.e., if/when there are distinct options from which to pursue the best (or, if uniquely hurt by downtime, the least bad).

Taking 4+ raid cycles (8+ minutes) to resync... in a 7-minute fight, or it being superior to just outright drop a full AF than remain desynced throughout, isn't nearly as "interesting" as it may first sound.

I agree completely. I just ask that you look concretely at the decision space it would provide. At present, it would seem to me like it'd more likely enforce pairings (thereby degrading options) more so than it would improve the number of actionable considerations SCH would work with.

i see your point, but if im completely honest im not sure if things would be that much worse for it. almost every single fight in the game nowadays has near full uptime anyways, and with so little healing needed dissipation might as well BE aetherflow 2, so all these negatives that quickened aetherflow would bring are already here. on the flip side, having to press AF and ED more often would certainly help to break the monotony of broil and would make sch more varied in its execution. the only time when this wouldnt apply is ultimate because of the increased healing requirements and how much downtime there is.

i do agree with you, especially on this bit:

If there was more to heal and more, besides just that trait, that made you want to look at and work around AF's CD (much like Stormblood Warrior with Enhanced Infuriate and a very low potency-per-gauge-efficiency loss on Onslaught), I could see the logic to it, but among modern healers and encounters?

quickened aetherflow would certainly be way more nuanced if we had actual ways to play with it (like if ED reduced the cooldown less than using a heal), but thats because healers have lost so much that no single simple change will really make them truly nuanced. but as they say, nowhere to go but up??

[Rilifane]

personally i feel that when everything in a jobs design is perfectly smooth and on rails, the job suffers for it because it takes away decision making and planning. its why i hate how every single thing nowadays is on a 120s cooldown; the jobs need to hold everyone's hand because people cant be trusted to use their neurons for extra damage that ultimately doesnt even matter outside of savage and ultimate.

I couldn't agree more.
QoL is one thing but I miss having classes on different burst timers. It's too smooth now, it aligns automatically and extreme niche cases aside there is no thought behind raid buffs. It's just a thing on 2min cooldown with a different flavour and that's it.
One of the biggest things I miss is TA every 60s. It was fun to play around it and dump some extra dps in those 15s without sacrificing dps for the next 2min burst. Can I dump a Xeno or two without screwing my movement mapping or my 2min burst? Can I squeeze in a short AF line instead of going through a UI noodle phase during TA? Can I delay my next melee combo without overcapping to align with TA? Those were small things but they added another layer for everyone who was interested in it but made no difference. Not even in Savage because dps checks were never so tight that they relied on the BLM dumping a Xeno during TA.
It was entirely optional, even in endgame content.
But at least we had that option. Now it's just always comfy, too comfy for me. I wanted comfy I could just ignore these things and I did if I didn't feel up to it.

It is why I unironically prefer SCH over SGE by now because with AF heals vs ED there is at least a tiny bit of decision making involved although even that usually boils down to "just hold your stacks until AF is about to come off cooldown, done" now that there are no 90s buff windows to play around.

[Shurrikhan]

It is why I unironically prefer SCH over SGE by now because with AF heals vs ED there is at least a tiny bit of decision making involved although even that usually boils down to "just hold your stacks until AF is about to come off cooldown, done" now that there are no 90s buff windows to play around.

Yup. And if we still had the occasional raid buff off the 120s interval, there'd be a lot more for Quickened Aetherflow to work around and into.

[Shurrikhan]

Maybe I'm odd but I actually enjoy hitting the Aetherflow button a lot, making sure I don't let it drift is fun for me.

I can understand that.

It kind of makes me wish certain job behaviors were conditional.

Imagine, for instance, that if one puts Aetherflow on one's bar, then it's an active cast as per now. (Moreover, you give SCH slightly more reason to want to bank and burst.) If you don't put it on your bar, though, then Aetherflow works like SCH, giving one every 20s until at 3 charges.

Now, one can argue that's letting the player choose to play less like a SCH, but... if we're not really making the most of that affordance across the job's feel and kit (making SCH feel enjoyably unique for being able to rapid-fire out 6 --or 9, with Dissipation-- whole charges), is that so bad?

[Nizzi]

they could do it the sage way and make them start with 3 stacks of aetherflow. no, instead take away their ability to have fun in even ways that dont matter.

This was what I was hoping would happen when I saw SGE had full stacks upon entering an instance and then later when they gave SGE full Addersting as well. I get that it would be basically 300 free potency for SCH now but I always assumed that the reasoning behind making Aetherflow combat only was because they didn't have the technology at the time. I only base that off the fact that they made that change and also removed Energy Drain, which eliminates the point of having it tied to combat at all if there's no DPS advantage to pooling Aetherflow. It was a DPS loss to use Aetherflow heals without Energy Drain at all in ShB too, so 0 clue what they were thinking with that one. Regardless, would it really be such a gamebreaker to just put it back to the way it used to be?

But yeah, I get "why" its like that but it feels pointless when they could change it back without much effort and do what they did to SGE to eliminate prepull 60s waiting or something. IDK, I know I'm weird but I would find it fun to play with Lustrate and Soil in towns and stuff. Sometimes it's fun just to blow all your heals on your friends when you're goofing around. I rarely have a reason at all to hit Lustrate due to Excog almost always invalidating it. At least let me use it in the city ;_;

[Shurrikhan]

This was what I was hoping would happen when I saw SGE had full stacks upon entering an instance and then later when they gave SGE full Addersting as well. I get that it would be basically 300 free potency for SCH now but I always assumed that the reasoning behind making Aetherflow combat only was because they didn't have the technology at the time.

So long as it's ultimately just going to come down to tuning, I don't hate not being forced (by starting each instance with 3 AF stacks) to blow 3 EDs almost instantly upon opening raid buffs to then AF and Disp for 6 more. But, I also wouldn't hate having that option.

[VentVanitas]

Bring back the Quickened Aetherflow trait you cowards