SCH is a mess, thematically and visually, and needs streamlining

[ForsakenRoe]

Hell every Broil / Bio / Ruin / Art of War cast could increase the fairy gauge by 5 points or something.

nah can't have that, that'd be one step away from forcing people to do damage as a healer and we know we can't have that /s

if we go with what Taurus said, converting the Aetherflow heals into Fey gauge spenders, theoretically we could change Aetherflow into a different max count, or even into a 0-100 gauge for more granularity. Atm it's 3, for SMN it's 2, so different maximums are apparently possible. lets imagine we make it a 0-100 gauge. having 'previously AF heals' now on a 0-100 gauge also gives some leeway in changing their cost based on their strength. Fey Blessing and Indom are, functionally, identical, but one comes from the SCH and one from the Fairy, thus they could have the same Fey gauge cost. But Soil is vastly better than either (being as it heals twice as much via it's regen, and also has %mit) so it could have a different price. EG Blessing/Indom are 20, Soil 30, Lustrate 10, Excog 15, Union 5 per tick, etc. then we can have a direct conversion, without having the issue of 'well, indom is 20, soil is 30, but both generate one aetherflow so indom is better for damage'.

so once we convert fey gauge into aetherflow, we'd be able to have tools to spend it, with various CDs. ED would presumably be the 'dump' skill, so i think it'd be good if it had a cost of 'all of your aetherflow', scaling in damage based on how much is consumed. or just 10 per use so you dont misclick and waste it all works too. then there could also be stuff like, idk, 30s CD Shadowflare which costs 30 to place, bring back Bane for 20 to spread DOTs (maybe with upfront damage to keep it as a better option than ED), etc. not sure what should generate should generate Fey gauge to start all of this off though, probably not something uptime reliant like attacking, else you'd be forced into using crappy Succor during something like High Concept. 'Fairy actions' could work, since Embrace is pretty low healing it'd almost always be firing off, making it the healing equivalent of 'PLD gets gauge by autoattacking', while still being able to generate even during downtime like HC2. It'd also incentivise the idea of 'use your fairy skills first preferably', but if people are full HP then it won't work. Unless they changed Embrace to always cast, with 'target of target' (aka the maintank) being chosen if everyone is full HP, to keep it precasting in case the MT takes an autoattack and to keep generating gauge

the problem is, a design like that would still force you to spend 'healing resource' on Lustrate to get the 'damage resource' (which feels bad). The alternative is that the two systems are separate, which also feels bad because it just continues to demonstrate that the damage and healing halves of the kit are distinctly seperate from each other instead of a cohesive whole. like slicing an orange and a lemon in half, and mixmatching the halves from the two together. 'theyre both citrus fruits so what does it matter' say the devs. I wonder how much SMN has had an effect on all of this, the EW rework should have been the time to seperate the two once and for all. Make SMN a job unlocked in ARR by getting any class to 30, and change ACN to a second healer choice on the main menu so people have options when they want to start a character and be a healer, instead of instantly railroading them into CNJ by default. Seems pretty obvious to me that ACN's evolution into SCH is the lore-apt one, and SMN is the side thing, rather than the other way round, especially since the SCH job trainer is in the same city the ACN guild is in. By having SMN be it's own standalone thing, the shared concepts between the two jobs wouldn't have to be shared, like getting Aetherflow as an ACN only to lose it becoming a SCH only to get it again at 45 because it's used for Lustrate. Just remove it from SMN entirely, make Fester and Painflare be shared 2 charges, 30s CD it's not rocket science but hey i'm not a rocket scientist so maybe it is way harder than it looks to me