Aetherial Shift vs Smudge - Please Explain

[TRMeowth]

Aetherial Shift:

15 Yalm dash / learned at lvl 40 = 60 second cooldown


Smudge:

15 Yalm dash + 5s sprint afterwards / learned at lvl 20 = 20 second cooldown


Why? Genuinely curious and not just trying to gripe. I was leveling a bunch of jobs today and went from Picto to WHM and it struck me as super odd that I couldn't spam it like Picto. I looked at the traits for later levels and I didn't see anything like additionally charges. Maybe I missed something? That feels more justifiable. Just seems odd that a dash ability with less going on would have a longer cooldown.

Is it just because it's on a healer? Not trying to add fuel to the fire for our poor healers right now, serious question. If someone smarter on the balance of the game can explain I'd love to hear an opinion for why it should be longer than Picto's Smudge.

[Chyro]

The simple answer is - different classes have different things. Perhaps they thought that being able to frequently dash fits pictomancer more than white mage. Some classes have mobility, some don't. Some dash, some teleport, some require a target or not, some have longer or shorter cooldowns, some do damage or not. Only the devs could tell you their reasonings why class X gets skill X with X cooldown - and I doubt they come into the forums and answer questions.

[Arrius]

Same reason Dark Knight and Gunbreaker has a non-damage gapcloser, while the Paladin and Warrior have their with damage attached to them.

No idea at all. And they do seem not telling us why they make such decisions.

[Fawkes]

Picto is the new job so it has to be made more fun to play than other jobs.

[TRMeowth]

Certainly wouldn't expect a dev to respond lol. Was more so curious to get with the community and see if there WAS anything more than "eh, flavor". I'm a Tank main and otherwise play RDM or RPR because healing is frankly too much responsibility for me lol. So was mostly just curious if someone who plays the role more might know something. "It wouldn't make sense / would be too much if, X" ya know?

[ryouma17]

Same reason Dark Knight and Gunbreaker has a non-damage gapcloser, while the Paladin and Warrior have their with damage attached to them.

No idea at all.

they do make weird decisions with abilities, like warrior dark and gun all getting their gapcloser in the 50s but paladin not getting it until 72 or blackmage and bard getting aoe at 15 but dragoon/ninja not getting aoe til lvl 40

[Arrius]

they do make weird decisions with abilities, like warrior dark and gun all getting their gapcloser in the 50s but paladin not getting it until 72 or blackmage and bard getting aoe at 15 but dragoon/ninja not getting aoe til lvl 40

Honestly, it would have been better to streamline the acquisition of the AoE rotation and gapcloser to be of the same level on all tank jobs.
Sure, this makes it appear to be just another step to homogenize all of the tanks - Though at least you can go ham with their abilities outside of it to provide a unique experience with each of them.

[GTK0HLK]

Honestly, it would have been better to streamline the acquisition of the AoE rotation and gapcloser to be of the same level on all tank jobs.
Sure, this makes it appear to be just another step to homogenize all of the tanks - Though at least you can go ham with their abilities outside of it to provide a unique experience with each of them.

Probably til they want to show us things.
Sadly at this moment, we can't deny the fact that players just want to pick at alot of changes until they either have someone more experienced tell them why it's good, or why it's bad.

and then see if it matches their end goal or not.

[aka, wait till they tell us more about 8.0 unless that was a straight lie, and not something the community will hold on them for job de-homohenization]

We can complain about differences and want the jobs to play exactly how we want em to, and not how the game could be, should be, designed to be, balanced to be, or tuned for higher end content as it usually is.

But what does it do rn. more so when we haven't even seen the first normal raid tier.

(Some people even think that SE is jumping the gun with VIPer changes this early on, with no Savage feedback. While Picto seems to remain unbalanced)

[Chyro]

Certainly wouldn't expect a dev to respond lol. Was more so curious to get with the community and see if there WAS anything more than "eh, flavor". I'm a Tank main and otherwise play RDM or RPR because healing is frankly too much responsibility for me lol. So was mostly just curious if someone who plays the role more might know something. "It wouldn't make sense / would be too much if, X" ya know?

The one thing I could think of when comparing white mage vs pictomancer gameplay - picto gets more value out of dashes to increase dps uptime. For a healer the dash may be a 'oh shit' button when caught in a wrong position and dashing to safety, or during dungeon pulls when falling too far behind tank. For picto as a caster dashing to a safespot instead of walking means they can go back to casting more quickly. Of course you could say healer gets the same out of that, but for heal the dps uptime is secondary and a lot of heals can be used insta-cast while on the move. For a heal 3sec of walking to safety isn't much of a loss, while for a dps caster it can matter (in high-end content).

In short, optimizing uptime is more prominent in dps caster gameplay than in healer gameplay which could be the reason for the difference in cooldowns.

[4clubbedace]

Same reason Dark Knight and Gunbreaker has a non-damage gapcloser, while the Paladin and Warrior have their with damage attached to them.

No idea at all. And they do seem not telling us why they make such decisions.

gnb and drk have morre busy burst windows, taking out the damagign gap closers let them able to weave in defensives if needed , war and pld have less ogcds, its simple, they explaining speiffially why they did this in a LL