As someone who considers themselves a Scholar main, who also has Sage at 90, I've found Sage easier when things are going right, but more difficult when things are going wrong. Maybe I don't understand Sage as well, but it feels like Sage is less able to recover bad situations. As Scholar you can combine Recitatation, Emergency Tactics and Succor for a potent AoE heal, or use Recitation, Adloquim and Deployment Tactics if you know a big AoE is about to hit. Sage doesn't quite seem to have these options.
Sage has similar yet different options. For example, eukrasian prognosis then pepsis heals very effectively, especially if combined with ixochole. Another option is Zoe into pneuma which is a 900 potency raid heal that has the possibility of critting as well! 🤔😊 That doesn't mean that you should find it easier to play sage. I imagine it is a case of being better acquainted with Scholar so you can more easily think on the fly when things go wrong! 😊
On that topic, I think damage control is important part of what makes a healer easy or difficult, especially in casual context where things may often not go remotely close to the plan (if there is a plan to begin with). And given I know nothing about Scholar - Sage does have good set of tools to recover from a "party in a bad spot" situation (like having only half of the group alive for multistack marker), but can struggle if you're trying to keep one person alive despite their best efforts - something I found White Mage excels at.
Sage honestly is the hardest healer if you walk into a dungeon/raid you don't know as sage is very big on being proactive. This will be very obvious when DT hits and most of your sage gonna struggle for a while. There are really good sage that knows how to deal with bad situations and have six sense for raid wides/random damage.
You can spam the basic aoe heal spell (prognosis) either with or without eukrasia (if shields are already on); it has x1.5 the pure healing potency of scholar's succor. Then quickly after Eukrasia+prognosis applies shield to party you can pop them with pepsis to give an even larger heal. Sage generally has so many cooldowns that at least 1 is always useable to you. Same as with tanks mitigations, don't use them all at once but try to spread them out over time.
RecitAdlo with Deployment is a favourite of mine for big raidwides. I've been able to mitigate attacks to the point that health bars don't even move. Having played all the healers, Scholar is absolutely my favourite
I've levelled Scholar, White Mage and Astro up to lvl 90, in that order. Haven't touched Sage yet. Weirdly, White Mage was actually by far the hardest time I had with the levelling process. In casual content, Scholar feels incredibly forgiving, because while it might be tough to make use of ALL of its kit properly, you can often get by simply with the Faerie autos and an Adlo or two - the only real time you NEED to go harder than that is on gigapulls, or on some of the trickier Normal Raids. Once you get Lustrate it's over, you barely even need to think about anything. Trying to play Scholar *well* is tricky, but playing it *well enough* is absolutely trivially easy IMO. White Mage felt like a big jump up in difficulty for me because suddenly I was responsible for keeping a close eye on health bars and reacting, rather than letting my Faerie do all the work and applying the occasional shield when I knew a big mechanic was coming up - you have to heal much more actively than Scholar does. It was especially difficult because - as mentioned in the video - White Mage relies on GCD heals for a LOT of its levelling process, and if you get a bit carried away DPSing you might end up in a race against the health bar going down, especially before you get Holy. I don't know if by the time I levelled Astro I was just more used to the pure healer playstyle or what, but I had a lot less trouble with it. I think Essential Dignity unlocking so early really helps, especially considering how powerful a tool it is. I also think maybe since applying cards involves keeping a closer eye on your party member I don't have the issue of not realizing my tank is dying like I do with WHM.
I'm having the opposite issue. WHM for me is trivially easy. All I really need to do is throw on two regens on the tank during mob pulls and slap him with one of the 3 ogcd heals I have when he gets low and spam holy until then. The stun acts as a significant amount of mitigation and the regens slow the damage enough that I can throw in plenty of holy before I need to top the tank back up. When it comes to barrier healers I fond it more difficult to know when and how to place their abilities and often it results in me having to focus on the tank more to keep them from dying. I often feel like the abilities are under powered because of this.
I just leveled my dark knight and it’s mind blowing how bad people are at scholar. I also found it the most fun healer to level. WHM was so boring with the GCD heals
I still feel WHM is the easiest, but there is a lot to be said for Eos. I think the problem with SCH is a lot of people try to play it when leveling like they are at level 90. They try to optimize Energy Drain, fill every GCD with Ruin/Broil, and avoid GCD heals. But if you...don't do that, if you use Lustrate and Adlo and even PHYSICK, it works far far better. Outside of that, learning to use oGCDs. If you treat oGCDs as emergency buttons, SCH (and SGE) are going to be a hard time. But if you hit them early and often and all the time? Much more powerful Jobs. WHM can be easier since Holy stun x3 gives you a lot of wiggle room and if you pop Presence of Mind, Thin Air, and just start throwing out Cure 2s (with Solace and Tetra when they are up), your target basically cannot die, even if it's a DRK using no mitigation. Once you run out of MP? Maybe. But until you do, you can keep almost anyone alive. No other healer really has the ability to do that as well as WHM. The problem is when people try to play SCH/AST/SGE like WHM. Or, as I said above, try to play them like they're level 90 when you're in a level 40 dungeon and don't have those tools yet and don't need to optimize for damage such that chain casting Cure 2 IS allowed. : )
I have entered endwalker with sage........ Stormblood has😢taken away my love for the sch....I still have a mini PTSD remembering .....I switched to astro.....shadowbringer has made me forget astro I switched to whm omegod.... After learning sage I got melancholy about sch so I have switched to sch..... And out of the all 4 whm is the job I find harder to play But I'm used to preventing And not responsive healing So it is something that is harder for me....😢
A tip that has helped me immensely for astrologian on controller is you can set up a cross hotbar section available by holding both triggers and then placing card macros in there to use Play on the macro'd target. It might mean no double weaving with play but it saves so much spam on the up and down buttons.
@@Scerttle Here's a macro I came up with: micon "Play I" merror off mlock Play I Play II Play III Astral Draw Umbral Draw Theoretically, it should work properly. UA-cam shadowbans my posts, hopefully, this one won't.
I main AST, and I love the busyness (and am grieving for that very thing in DT), but I remember when I was first learning, I thought I was going to lose my mind over the APS. Now, that's the fun part!
@@NikopolAUAST is only fun in casual content when people start screwing up and you actually have a reason to start using your tools to keep them alive. I encourage dps to eat vuln stacks at this point in casual content.
I'm also grieving for that, AST is the only healer which keeps me engaged and has something fun to offer - doing the optimised 2 minute rotation perfectly is such a feel good moment, especially when it's RNG and can be done from 7 to 11 weaves depending on if you need to redraw or not, etc. But of course, it got simplified going into EW from ShB, and yet again it's being simplified. I'll be quitting healing because of it.
Something else to mention is that astro is one of the few classes where practicing your burst properly on a dummy isn't feasible, can make it really rough to learn
I think the main issue with Ast is the high level of weaving that the card system makes you do that any amount of spell speed makes it absolutely misable to casually optimise. I've just ignored my GCD timer sometimes to just handle the cards because weaving draw 1, seeing the card icon and figuring out whether you want melee/ranged(add extra time if you have to pick between multiple of the same spilt), selecting the dps and using play and getting back on the boss is not very easily squashed within a single GCD window. there's likely an easier solution the comminity has frankensteined to make it quicker but I'm not sure if I want to set up an entire hotbar set up just to squish AST only things when I can just play another healer and not have to worry about that at all.
Astrologian definitely has the most things to keep track of, the most extensive set of tools, and the most frustrating peculiarities (being so busy with the card targeting and still having to go back and re-center your target for Gravity in a pack of enemies will always annoy me), but something about it just clicks for me and makes it easy for me to understand. Comparatively I can't wrap my head around Scholar no matter what, so that got my vote. Though if I can doompost for a bit, Astrologian doesn't seem like it's going to get much of a fix in Dawntrail. I like the card changes and new abilities on paper, but the way they implemented everything just seems... incomplete. To go over a few things that catch my attention: -Loss of one draw every minute and Astrodyne leaves it with a 1250 MP per minute deficit after factoring in the draws we get and Lucid Dreaming. With slight variance depending on spell speed and piety, an Astrologian will run out of mana in 8 minutes, assuming optimal MP regeneration and doing nothing more MP-intensive than Malefic/Combust every GCD. -The new draw patterns encourage either dumping your entire starting four cards ASAP (which doesn't make its already busy opener any less busy) or just outright ignoring The Arrow and The Spire to use Lord of Crowns and The Balance for the damage, switch to Umbral Draw quicker, and get to The Spear during raid buffs. The latter can become an issue if you're mid-cast when Astral/Umbral Draw comes off cooldown, since any delay to those is going to start drifting The Spear out of buff windows. -To add onto the last point, the fact that the opener/burst is still so busy means that Lightspeed is still required for double-weaving in buff windows. The 90-second cooldown is still superfluous since you will always want to wait the extra 30 seconds; single-weaving during Astrologian's burst just isn't an option. -Malefic got a damage buff but Macrocosmos didn't, meaning Macrocosmos is now a DPS loss. -Losing two damage buff cards (one on the odd minute, one on the even minute) and Astrodyne hurts pretty bad when Astrologian is already the worst healer for personal DPS. All it got to replace them are a buff to Lord of Crowns (150 extra potency), the extra hit after Divination (600 potency), and a few more seconds on Divination to bring it up to 20 seconds like they're doing to lots of raid buffs. I think overall it'll struggle to break even with its old rDPS, while other jobs are getting more damage tools and overall increases to their own DPS. -Sun Sign is locked behind Neutral Sect, which, while Neutral Sect is very powerful on paper, is something that a good Astrologian really never needs to use outside of high-end content. Since you ideally want to never use Aspected Helios or Aspected Benefic if you can get by with your oGCD options and Macrocosmos, that means that if you want to use Sun Sign you'll either be burning Neutral Sect mid-fight just to get access to it without actually making use of Neutral Sect itself, or just popping Neutral Sect pre-pull to get the shield on the tank with Aspected Benefic and get the Suntouched proc for Sun Sign for mid-fight. -This one's more of a personal nitpick, but The Spear going from a melee-focused damage buff to a ranged-focused damage buff is going to confuse the hell out of me for a while. No clue why they couldn't keep the two damage buff cards consistent with ones they already had in Endwalker. A lot of these issues seem like oversights (the MP issue and Macrocosmos's lack of potency increase especially) that can be easily fixed, but it doesn't fill me with confidence that we got this close to release and through the media tour with all of these glaring issues, especially considering that the changes... really didn't make the job any easier, just slightly different. I'd hardly even call it a rework, all that really changed is that you traded two damage cards and RNG for four non-damage cards and lack of RNG.
I agree with a lot of your points, especially the neutral sect thing. square should know better than to lock stuff behind gcd heals, since players are constantly optimizing to AVOID burning gcd on redundant healing that could be otherwise covered by oGCDs.
@Larry. Agreed. Neutral sect is such overkill for any casual content that it's easy to forget about it and even in savage and ultimates, you really just want to avoid it if you can. It's a good button if your cohealer goes down or you need to solo heal a certain phase but having a dps skill locked behind it just means now we're going to be burning neutral sect every 2 minutes regardless of whether it's a waste or not.
@@matrinezkevin11492 here's to hoping it's damage neutral so we can use it when we need to and save it when we don't (like sage pneuma against single target)
As a WHM main, I agree it feels the easiest. One thing not mentioned about its kit in the video is Divine Benison, an instant ability that lets you drop a small shield on a target, which has 2 charges at high level. It makes WHM the fastest healer at shielding one specific person (which can be themselves!). At higher levels we can also combo it with Aquaveil, our single-target damage reduction ability. Double tapping Benison and Aquaveil on a target about to take a big hit (like that poor DPS who keeps getting vuln stacks) can be the difference between having to cast Raise or not. This tiny bit of "shield healer" kit that WHM has also helps with riding the line on Holy's cast to stun time, as a Divine Benison is a 500 potency shield, which compares favorably to Tetragrammaton 's 700 potency heal. By comparison SCH and SGE feel a little more sluggish with their shields (in casual content!), where I may use them perfectly based on the boss mechanics, but then have to scramble to help that one party member who keeps failing mechanics. I can partly get around that by singling out the struggling party member for priority on shields at the cost of general party shielding, but it's rough if there's more than one person having trouble with the fight. I agree at low levels WHM can feel slow, but once we have Regen at 35, we effectively have our own "fairy", at least for babysitting the tank, as Regen is a 250 HOT compared to the Fairy's 180 potency Embrace (at the cost a GCD every 18s). We just have to be a bit more active in watching the rest of the party's HP! At at those low levels, we can't do anything else on the run (besides tagging mobs with Aero), so keeping Regen on the tank is free. You can also use it like an instant Cure 1, though unlike an AST's Aspected Benefic it doesn't heal when it's applied. It's still a good way to patch up a DPS without wasting the time or MP of a Cure 2 on them.
@@aethon0563 pov: you go out of your way to be miserable Astro is FANTASTIC this expansion and their ogcds work far differently from whm. The fact you do this to yourself only process you're lacking experience with both of them and nothing will make you happy
One other thing that helps me with Sage VS Scholar is the amount of hardcasts you have to do. I can constantly fish for crit E.Diagnosis between pulls with Sage in a way that I just can't with SCH, or put party-wide shields up _while_ moving for a mechanic. Icarus is also an immense help for fixing positioning mistakes that NONE of the other healers have (yet).
That said, you can almost completely avoid hardcasts at all with SCH. If you have Aetherflow stacks but your cooldowns are all available, you quite literally can carry up to 10 stacks' worth of healing, which is absurd (3 in gauge, next Aetherflow on standby, Dissipation on standby, Recitation + Excog on standby).
Slight tangent but as iconic as it is, I really wish Holy was a blind and not a stun. Whenever I play melee DPS or Tank its so annoying to have a mob I want to interupt be immune to stuns because of DR caused by the WHM. Making it a blind would essentially do the same thing of "reducing" the damage enemies do without causing DR on stuns. (If that's how DR in ff14 works anyways).
@@CaetsuChaijiCh I don't quite remember from the paladin flash days, but wasn't blind something like 90% chance to miss? I can't imagine it being less than 60%.
@Mikrowelliger hmm I am not sure, but given that blue mages can apply blind, this is something that could be tested 🤔 My point was more that it would in a way be a nerf? 😅😊
I heard white mage was easiest so when I got into healing went there first. I was struggling. Turns out barrier is best for me. Sch in early game then I got to sage and it’s my love my heart my everything. I love it more than tanking. It’s my go to.
Ive gone in alliance raids as a scholar and had a sage partner One was purely out to cause me specifically a hard time During a boss aoe, i applied my strong shield combo, did recitation adlo, and spread all the shield to the party The sage, used the eukrasian prognosis, on me only, and reduced my shield intensly Didnt bother anyone else tho But everytime i did the strong shield, eukrasian prog was put on me and me alone Different raid, i had a tank friend tell me when he was going to get the alliance tank buster and i wanted to test my scholars sheild strength I did shield combo, rescued the tank to me so it was just me and him, he had the tbaoe, i stayed with him I lived, with shield left over
I was in a similar situation, however, in my situation, the sage kept applying it to the whole alliance but only after i applied a shield, never before my shield. Then they apologized for it but kept doing it. The apology meant nothing to me because the behavior didn't change.
@@CaetsuChaijiCh I'll admit, even tho I do play sage often I do get a bit confused which is the AOE shield and which is the single shield when NOT on the gme
@@ZianaSue I had also one sage that would apply a Zoe and then not do anything until I have put up shields Around the last boss I saw the Zoe, I used succor and then they applied their shield, then did the crit shield spread and they actively called me out in alliance chat about them wasting a Zoe because I didn't give them the "strong shield boost" Apparently they thought if scholars gave a shield, when they use Zoe to overwrite a scholar shield, it turns all the shield into mitigation ........hmm, told them to go read the updates for sage and scholar
that sounds like the single targeted shield and not the aoe one, that's super weird. I try to be mindful as sage if a scholar applies their shields first, that sage just sounds like a jerk :(
My personal beef with White Mage centers on a couple things I did: 1. Leveling from 30-50 WITHOUT doing the Job Quests for other skills (No Regen, No Cure 3, No Holy) 2. Aurum Vale......nuff said. 3. Rando tanks that pull EVERYTHING in Aurum Vale.
@@trevorromein14so... You failed yourself and you failed yourself...? That doesn't mean the class is bad lol, that's on you. Ofc the class will feel bad if you're missing the unlockables the game expects you to have. Next I'll see a marauder at 50 and change the warrior job. My very first experience was whm and even I got aurum vale it was a cake walk though I got it during my time in shb. Here's a protip: use Regen. Another protip: you can use the stun from holy to apply Regen, medica 2, cure 2 on the tank before the mobs recover
Played all healers during savage progress this exp and astro it's the hardest just for the rng part but when u can exploit marcocosmos it's the best thing ever (loved getting no brain clears on P3). Another thing with astro being hard it's that a first glance it's hard to tell if u are doing well dps wise even looking at Act and it's the healer that gets impacted the most by how others play.
Yeah that makes sense. You wouldn't know if you are doing well from act exactly because so much of the ast value is in what everyone else is doing too! And exactly because of healers being impacted by everyone else, sometimes if it looks like a healer is doing poorly, it's actually because john black mage decided to not dodge a mechanic a few too many times 😂
@@CaetsuChaijiChyeah 6% extra damage can vary wildly in value depending on whether it's 6% of an amazing dps or 6% of my trash ass dps. AST really lives and dies by how well their raid group does even in the healing department with their VERY strong oGCDs that can carry you through pretty much any fight assuming people aren't eating too much extra damage for no appreciable gain.
Sage and Astro are so scary for me. I have such healer anxiety already, but White Mage was so easy levelling where it was almost entirely 'drop medica2, drop regen on the tank'. Every now and then I'd have to cure 3 for party wides or dropping a shield on someone when it comes up. I only had one wipe my entire time getting it to 90. Meanwhile... I have at least 1 wipe a day with Sage (wiped twice on ToZ in a single run, even... ugh), even when I'm hitting literally all of the buttons until I'm doing the basic heal. Having levelled 2 healers in a row, I'm saving Astro for after Dawntrail comes out 😅 Not touching scholar at all outside of the job quests lmao. Blessed be Summoner.
I think the reason why you're struggling so much with sage and scholar is that you're treating them like White mage. Their heels are not quite as strong as White mage, so you might struggle if you let the tank get on really low HP all the time and expect to heal it instantly. With sage and scholar, you want to start healing the tank when it gets to like 50 or 60% HP. Also, you can use Shields proactively, and place them before damage
I personally view Sage as a weird variation on a regen healer. You're not gonna do big burst heals, but you're great at having a constant throughput on heals. Haima and panhaima are pretty much a regen shield, and you can swap Kardia around to help top off people who need heals. And with Sage getting the AOE Kardia button in DT, it seems their doubling down on that regen healer style for Sage.
something that people keep skipping over when comparing sage and scholar is that eukrasia makes shielding on the move much easier and paired with icarus makes the job very mobile and zoomy
astro main here. it's always weird hearing people say that astro is hard, but because i've only tried white mage and astro, i just see it as the more interesting option.
You are free to think that but white mage is the superior healer all around & thats not opinion, its fact. If its harder content, whm is perfect for it whereas sage or ast takes a certain level of proficiency that doesnt make it more interesting, just different than a pure healer & easier to work in low level dungeons because whm flourishes at level 50+ content because the healing becomes a lot better.
@@sammicopor That... is not fact. They're well-balanced enough that the call between White Mage and Astrologian for high-end content comes down to whichever one can handle particular fight mechanics better, and the choice can vary from fight to fight. In a vacuum, Astrologian is better because it brings more damage and utility overall than White Mage, while in practice, like I mentioned, it depends on which one is the best for a particular fight. White Mage also has a VERY awkward growth period throughout the leveling process. Its only oGCD heal at level 50 is Benediction, which has an insanely long cooldown. It doesn't get its main job gimmick until 52, and doesn't get a way to make up for the damage loss from Afflatus Solace until 74. By that point Astrologian has pretty much already gotten enough tools to sustain a party in normal content without using any GCD heals in place of attacking. You can absolutely prefer one to the other, like how I definitely prefer Astrologian, but there is no "fact" that points to White Mage being superior, especially "all around" when Astrologian brings better damage and more tools.
In raw healing, White Mage is always gonna be SE's favorite, but Astro vs. White Mage overall, Astro IS better. You've got lightspeed, Card Buff, Macrocosmos, etc. What makes Astro superior is it's recovering ability in high end content. You've got a bunch of morons having issues with mechs? Dude, Astro's recovery and ability to regen MP to keep recovering people's asses is insane. This is specifically in parties having a hard time, BUT even in parties that are doing well, as a pro Astro, I still carry my WM co healer in everything. If you know what you are doing as an Astro, it tops WM any day.
@@sammicopor This... is not fact. The two jobs are pretty well-balanced, to the point where the choice between them for high-end content comes down to which one interacts more favorably with raid-specific mechanics. Outside of those specifics instances, in a vacuum, Astrologian is the clear winner with more utility, more oGCD heals, higher raid DPS, a smoother leveling experience (courtesy of getting Essential Dignity so early), etc. You can prefer one to another, sure, but calling it "fact" is just wrong, especially not "all over" when the ONLY things White Mage has over Astrologian are raw healing potency and personal DPS.
As someone who started as an arcanist, my first experience healing in the game was with a scholar healer. Yes, the tech gets pretty advanced as you level, but being down aetherflow stacks, as opposed to addersgall stacks, doesn't really feel that bad for me. Being down your special resource isn't as punishing on a scholar, but then again, it was my first healer to level, so I'm biased. Sage is still hella fun, don't get me wrong. But reci excog is my favorite combo for healers. I should point out that I do have both Sage and Scholar at 90, with Astro being lvl 73 and I just got White Mage to 70. I just know it was fun to pull things like Haukke Manor with my fairy literally doing all of the healing. Early level dungeons with scholar is insanely easy, especially in dungeon levels before WHM or AST get their regens. I will say the fact that SCH has the least amount of damaging options compared to any of the other healers is a major drawback, I still say the job is fairly simple if you read your tooltips and get proactive rather than reactive. Neither SCH or SGE play well reactively if you are out of resources. You gotta know what's coming.
I mostly agree with this difficulty ranking. AST is at the top for a few reasons. The cards are the biggest reason, but also having to time certain things, and the fact that the aoe attack is targeted. Every other healer can just target the tank and spam their attack. I do rank SCH as harder than SGE, but the fairy isn't a factor. I'd rather deal with the fairy than have to juggle Kardia. In Dawntrail the Kardia juggling will be at least partially mitigated by Philosophia. When I play healer I prefer to play SCH, but Philosophia might change that. Where my rankings differ is with SGE and WHM, as I find SGE to be easier. On a side note, SGE shields overwriting SCH shields really needs to be fixed. As a SCH I'm in pain every time I get a SGE cohealer, because they will consistently overwrite my shields. They don't even think about it, Eukrasian Prognosis is their default, even though they have to push an extra button to access it.
SCH main, and I agree about SGE co-healer. Less of an issue in say Labyrinth, but I’ve left trial groups before due to being paired with SGE. The pairing is sub optimal and adds unnecessary challenges to higher level encounters
As someone who has leveled SCH, SGE, and WHM to 90, I can only speak to those 3. But, here's my thoughts, briefly: SCH: This was a fun leveling experience because Eos (RIP Selene, but no one used you anyways...) was very useful for quick heals. At the higher levels though, I found some of the additional skills didn't click with me. I always forgot which is the emergency skills to use in what situations. The Fairy skills sometimes didn't feel as impactful. But overall, it was a solid healing class. SGE: Once I got past the confusing colours/names of the skills (yes, this was overwhelming at first and deterred me from playing it for a LONG time), I found a great flow with SGE. Even starting at level 70, it doesn't really start to "work" until closer to 80. I've also found that more than the other 2 healing classes I've played, SGE has a much higher APM. Needing to press Eukrasia to add shields becomes a lot, especially when trying to upkeep it on the tank so you can get Addersting to do high damage, I feel like it has become arthritis inducing. Lol. I do find it more challenging than the others due to the APM, but I think it flows more smoothly once you get used to it. WHM: Honestly, a very straight forward class, with not much going on, even at high levels. So many of the added features at the higher levels feel "meh." Aside from spamming Holy (the ONLY AOE attack that also requires a cast time, unlike SCH and SGE) to get the stun, I get bored with it. The being said, it's not a bad class. I just slowly lost the desire to play it.
The difficulties of Astrologian have been *amazing* for my ADHD, giving me a minigame of sorts to play while I'm playing the game and quieting that part of my mind while I'm busy actively focusing on the fight. It's a weird balance but I got *very* good at it and enjoy the business of it. I'm a little sad they took away that, and am afraid it'll become as "boring". It's a learning curve, but I don't know that everything should be "easy".
I don't have ADHD, buuut I'm coming back from WoW, where I kinda got used to the super tiny GCD. So Astro's been nice for me. Plus once I memorized what card was what, it just became "does this go on the melee DPS or the ranged?"
As someone who just doesn't click with SCH at all I was a little worried when SGE came along as I was thinking it was maybe that I wouldn't click with shield healers at all.. but I really quickly ended up having no issues with SGE at all. The concept of having something of a "toggle" button that changed ability functions just made sense to me right from the start. While I'm not a healer main by any stretch, I would actually choose SGE over either WHM or SCH because it just feels "right" to me. AST is still my favourite, though, and when I heal I always prefer AST even if it can be a struggle.
I fully understand this can be addressed in an upcoming video, but the changes to astro for Dawntrail are incredibly controller friendly. Play 1 can be assigned to DPS and that only needs to be pressed once every 60 seconds (or twice every 2 minutes under optimal play). The other play buttons are basically for tanks in optimal scenarios or flexible buttons for party members if the need arises. Significantly better than giving a card on a 60 second timer and 3 cards on a 2 minute timer under ideal conditions. Don't let astro discourage you from trying the class.
For those AST on controller players: Macro your Card stuff. First I have a Macro to stack up Draw and Redraw. More importantly, Play takes you to a dedicated xbar with numbers 1-8. These buttons Play the current card to the player in that numbered slot, or with fewer party members, 5-8 go to 1-4. Then you get shunted back to your regular bar. Makes AST playable imo.
For someone who sucks in healing and i am terrible the job list in my pov is sge>whm>ast>sch sge is what help me carry and do a better healing and focus. whm i always choke when something goes wrong. ast is very hard but somehow i am relying on luck with cards to help me clear some stuff(its the only job i really use luck). didnt touch sch because of smn, i know the job is much harder than any other healing job
Since the launch of heavensward, if I am going to have a "bad" healer when I'm tanking it has been a AST healer. Its to the point if I'm not Lving a one of the other tanks I just play WAR. But when I get a great AST they are amazing an you really notice them :)
I heal main Astro. It is definitely the busiest and most complicated of the healer jobs. The complexity makes daily queues less dull and buffing hypothetically makes them go quicker. Had to rethink my button layout several times to make it work though.
Another point when it comes to white mage is, it is the only healer in the game that you can start the game as - and if you're a fresh sprout new to Final Fantasy, White Mage might feel harder as, you're new to the game as a whole. However, will agree, easiest healer in my opinion as well.
AST main and I swear it's not necessarily that the job is harder, it's that so many things are just so pointlessly complex that i'm really glad they try fixing it for dawntrail: -perfect card rotations to get a very negligable damage / heal boost -RANDOM Arcana Card that either results in a GCD heal because you just couldn't get the heal over the damage card, or an overheal because you didn't need the heal and just couldn't get the damage over the heal card -needs good knowledge of the game to perform perfectly (you need to know which job bursts at which timer to give them cards, although i reiterate that it's an act of perfection, the damage is very negligable unless you do very hard content or parse) -the biggest pain: you need a 20 seconds pre-pull timer just to get your card rotation... TY YOSHI for fixing that for Dawntrail but oof, was it painful for EW... Alina Linmew on Louisoix btw :D
Yeah now it's not 20 but 60, way better! :P I do think they will change it soon so astral/umbral draw cant be used outside of combat but for now it's like that
Despite the jank of SCH, I sometimes find it the better healer than SGE. Besides the fact that SCH can stockpile way more healing resource than SGE (3 in gauge, Aetherflow ability, Dissipation, Recitation + Excog), its Sacred Soil is higher in potency (600 vs. 500 Kerachole) and doesn't conflict with Excog (Kerachole fights with Taurochole), Fey Blessing is weaker but can be used twice as often as Holos, faerie's auto healing is very good at not overhealing (whereas Kardia must be juggled between players to avoid overhealing), and I also find Consolation to better than Panhaima, although SGE does get Pneuma at 90 and SCH lacks any such equivalent (they then feel fairly equal at 90, but SGE feels... behind? at 80 sync.)
I didn't level Sage until recently because they were hard when the came reading was hard and those words were definitely words. It wasn't until recently I realized that I wasn't applying Kardia. I have since been having a lot of fun. It is definitely "Scholar, but you'll never get the supreme satisfaction of hitting a crit Adlo."
Okay so. I'm gonna throw in my healer expert 2 cents here. What healer tends to be the easiest, depends on what you're used to, and a few other factors. White mage is considered the easiest, because it is just no-nonsense burst healing, but the people who find difficulty with it are usually ones who started as scholar mains, or a non-healer class. Another factor is if you are used to healing/support in other games, White Mage is the easiest to click to because it literally is just a culmination of every other healer in any RPG you've probably played prior to FFXIV. But the biggest factor is what I mentioned before, if you're used to shield healers (a predictive mitigation type), then you will struggle to adapt to regen healers (reactive burst types). You train yourself to mitigate before the damage happens, only to swap to healing after the fact, and you will have some trouble if it's not what you're used to. That's not even to mention if you are a DPS main first and foremost, you aren't even trained to watch your party's health in the first place, and Tank is in a similar boat to an extent (since some tanks train themselves to be able to better protect others).
Absolutely bravo 100000% I'm shield main lol.....and whm still at 81 and dropped ast when it has adjusted allot.... Very difficult to understand .... Everything feels very difficult....😢...though I love whm....glamor and story....😢 And wow switching to smn Making me feel not good dps 😢😢 Cause I'm always looking for who to raise instead of doing damage..... Smn though soo much fun and I'm switching to pct and ohh boy where are my heals😂 Though have huge room for paying attention to the boss fights not worrying who needs a heal is nice ❤
I'm an AST main, I absolutely love it. I like juggling everything and it has a fun tool kit. I've had fc mates tell me that SCH has to memorize a fight/dungeon more than any other healer and I don't think they realize how much pre-planning needed or how many dungeons/trials I've memorized LOL If you don't you are TRULY just reacting and it makes it a lot harder
To those people I simply ask them to observe Earthly Star and the layered buffs of 2 cards + Lord + Divination for burst window. If that isn’t intensive planning, idk what is.
It's eather memories or ask someone to put a marker above their head......I just recently have switched to smn and leveling pct and wow my reactions to avoid boss aoe is amazing 😂....have played healers for 10 years 😆
I played since start and hardest was always whm....just personally... I get very anxious when things go sour.....shields always have give me room to decide what i can do next.....
im relatively new to Scholar personaly, but i think Scholar definetly needs a rework on several Aspects of the Job because of how clunky they feel like compared to the other Healers. For example: - Energy Drain: is a 100 Potency Instand Cast that only does mild damage and gives you a very small self heal that might not be there in the first place for how little it is. its only used for the Opener or on heavy movement Phases to do damage, but i found that Aetherflow is far too valiuable, and usualy reserve it for Sacred Soil and Exco because they offer far more Valiue for your buck. Energy Drain is definetly a Spell that needs to be either really buffed damage wise, or completly reworked into another Spell because in my opinion its more Bait than anything. - Ruin II: does over 2x more Damage than Energy Drain, but has the downside of being on the GCD where its pretty much pointless to use unless youre walking a lot and you know where you can do Damage, which in many Boss Phases, usualy Mechanics where you have to walk a lot come with Raidwide Damage being dealt to the Group, where you gotta keep an eye on Peoples HP, or in dungeon Pulls, where usualy Mobs are stacked, and since its only a Single Target Spell, Art of War II deals more Damage for over 2+ Targets, which makes Ruin II to such a nieche Spell, that i think i used ot almost never to be honest. Its like Black Licorice, you can eat it if youre hungry, but why should you? just get some Popcorn instead. - Aetherpact: An entire Resource Bar that has the SOLE Purpose to put a strong single Target Hot on someone that you can Toggle on and off. this might be controvertial because its not directly a bad Spell, it has its good uses and can be really nice to throw on a Tank thats just getting Spanked concistantly by a group of Mobs or if theres consistant Burst happening onto a Target where you can let Eos do the healing and focus on the others, which is where my complaints are: some Spells in your Kit can Toggle Aetherpact off where you have to be careful that if you use Spells that toggle Aetherpact off, that you keep an eye on the Target where Eos was Hooked on. Same goes for going out of Reach where you dont wanna cast Aetherpact in Dungeon Scenarios or Fights where you walk quite a distance away from Eos if you Position Eos somewhere Manualy. In my opinion, i think it just lacks something. Job specific Resources have usualy more Utility where you have multible Options on how to Spend and or use that Resource on, and if they are tied to one Specific Spells, they usualy have a high inpact and Great Visuals to go along with. it can be strong when used right, but the usage and situations are a bit limited, where its not rare where you just sit on a Maxed out Eos gage, waiting to use Aetherpact for, but everyones topped off and you cant really find a perfect momend to use Aetherpact on, which can happen sadly, so it feels like its more of an Emergency thing if anything, which could be better, like have other Spells make usage of the Eos gage, or give Aetherpact a stronger secondary effect to use along when you use Seraph where it could be an AOE Heal for everyone around a few Yalms around the Target thats hooked on or Rework Energy Drain that it doesnt cost Aetherflow anymore, but can be a Dot that Eos cast where Eos would Drain the Energy out of the Target you casted it on, grants the Heal for the damanged amount to a nearby target, which would make the opener a bit weaker for Scholar, but youd have a different option to do damage with and you would have to worry much about it with a higher Single Target potency if used on Max gage. TLDR: Scholar needs a bit of Love and definetly deserves it for how Unique and fun the Job is.
Only thing that's "difficult" or rather "tricky' about Sage is Eukrasia. It's a weave, but it works counter to how everything else in the game has taught you to weave. Until you get used to it, you'll often miss shielding your tank and inadvertently apply a DoT to an enemy. As for AST, it's not really hard in and of itself. The hard part is learning to play it optimally i.e. efficiently getting 3 seals and distributing cards for maximum effect.
This is more or less mine as well. WHM's only difficulty is being a bit rigid and having SO LITTLE party mitigation (only Temperance), vs all the other healers having more (AST has 3x per 2 mins between Collective x2 and Neutral Sect, which turns it into a GCD barrier healer for 20 seconds). SGE seems hard, but is SCH if SCH's tools were more straightforward and is far more mobile. SCH is harder, but I feel like it is more powerful, but less mobile when avoiding Ruin 2. And AST is the hardest, as you say, combining the harder elements of all three, then adding Cards. It will be interesting to see how this shifts in Dawntrail since SGE optimization MAY (we don't know the final ability potencies yet) have a second DoT to maintain as its "Miasma 2" and CD with effectively SB SCH's Shadow Flare (the 60 sec CD oGCD attack), while SCH continues to be weird, but Seraphism is the inverse of Neutral Sect and SCH's "new attack" could be described as "press Chain Strategem twice". WHM will probably remain the easiest and even gets a movement tool at level 40 and another mitigation for the party, bringing the number to TWO per 2 minutes, though it is tied to using Temperance. And while it is getting another attack spell, it is instant cast, uses the same button as PoM so will not contribute to button bloat, and tied to PoM so you can effectively just press THAT button 4 times along with Misery and Dia and Assize, and have a good burst window. AST looks to be less RNG, though the burst window will still have it ideally playing at least 2 Cards, and like SCH it has a follow-up to its raid buff, Divination. It looks to be powerful, like SCH for the barrier healers, but a bit less mental load from the Card game, while still having some. I suspect WHM will remain the one considered the easiest, though I could see AST moving down (or up somehow), and SGE and SCH moving around. So those three could end up in any order. WHM is the only one I'm mostly sure will stay in the same place.
Addendum to the fun fact: In Shadowbringers, Afflatus Misery was worth exactly 3 Glares and that was considered okay. This was because Glare used to have a full 2.5-second base cast time, so the DPS loss was considered worth it for movement. Conventional wisdom said you wanted to spend 1 lily or 3 so as to limit your DPS loss to 1 Glare at a time. In Endwalker, Glare's cast time was reduced to 1.5 seconds at base along with the other healers, but there was no consideration for how that would affect the rest of the kit. Lilies were no longer needed for movement, plus they simply forgot to raise Afflatus Misery's potency relative to the new Glare III. This made lilies an even worse DPS loss before and led to the described problems before Afflatus Misery's potency was buffed. WHM players also became famously stingy with their lily heals in high end content, much to the annoyance of their cohealers.
I was whm for a long long time. I leveled other healing jobs lately. I love Sage. It's my main now. For some reason I can't be a good Scholar. I tried. Nope. I panic more and I'm less confident with this job than any other healer. Ast was fun at low levels but is just more complicated whm later for me. I believe that the hardest job is the one you don't feel good with.
I feel like AST is the only one that actually has a somewhat higher learning curve due to needing to learn optimal timings for Earthly Star placement while managing cards on top of the usual cooldown planning every other healer is subject to.
The hardest part of AST is remembering to use your Minor Arcana card, because your heals and shields are so disgustingly good, you don't need it half the time. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) Never considered how much of a pain the cards were for controller though. Sounds like a nightmare.
I feel like the controller comment is an excuse. I can easily do triple card bursts with controller without drifting. It just takes practice like everything else.
I used to main astrologian when I played on pc, but when my pc broke and I had to switch to console I couldn't find a comfortable way to map the controller and had to switch to sage. I never did figure it out
I have a funny relationship with the healers. I started with White Mage, aye, and for a long time I couldn't understand why people played Scholar. Scholar was much harder, and had much less healing. So one day I got fed up with it and set myself a challenge. I am not allowed to use White Mage, only Scholar. If I'm only allowed to play Scholar, then I'll just have to git gud, right? Well, this worked, and now I actually rather like Scholar. However I now have the opposite problem. I don't know how to play White Mage anymore. And then there's Sage. I love Sage. You telling me, a Gundam fan, that I can play Scholar with *funnels*?! This class has become my new obsession in the past week or two. It took some time to learn, and I still am not anywhere close to optimal, but I'm learning! Dancer is my main, but I just can't put Sage down. "I can just play Sage for this." "Eh, I don't need Dancer for this, I'll just play Sage." "Hmm. Maybe one more dungeon as Sage"
This is precisely the order I'd put them in. With the AST changes coming in DT I'm hoping it'll drop in difficulty significantly, as the card system is definitely The Hard Part - I find the actual healing with AST incredibly easy, but the cards are so annoying. As a SCH main, I personally find SCH super easy, but I know my kit extremely well, and I'm very good at memorising fights to know which Aetherflow need to be used for healing and when, and which can be used for Energy Drain. A lot of SCHs are... less than mediocre. I cannot tell you how many times I've been in a duty and gone "Did I just hear Deployment" when _nobody_ had a shield, so I start paying attention and... yeah, they're just using Deployment Tactics on cooldown, regardless of whether or not their target has a shield to deploy. They never seem to use Emergency Tactics unless I specifically let them know that's a button they have (something I sometimes have to do in, say, Orbonne for the Thunder God heal check, or P11 for Harrowing Hell, when I'm not the one healing). Exclusively using Ruin II at level 90 because it's instant-cast. Stuff like that. All my friends who've tried SCH after playing SGE get extremely tripped up by the Aetherflow, not knowing how many to "save for healing" - which is what knowing entire fights is for. You save exactly as many as that fight needs, and only when you need to. Meanwhile I notice that even SGEs and WHMs who aren't necessarily That Good are still Fine. But maybe this is the same hyper-awareness effect that you noticed in that Mentor Roulette video when you went "Oh no, am I a healer main?" because that was the moment I realised "Oh no, am I a SCH main?" 😂 I did once meet a WHM who was standing off in Narnia during dungeon pulls casting Holy, and when I let them know that it was a point-blank AOE and they weren't hitting anything, they responded "You're not my dad". Not even "You don't pay my sub". Absolutely bizarre.
Gotta say, I as a new player find people saying SCH and AST hard kind of surprising. Perhaps its because all the buttons have very specific ways to use them that it makes it easier for me to play them, vs WHM for instance in which every button pretty much just feels like "and this button also heals". I actually have a harder time with whm ironically because I spend a lot of time "playing chicken" with tank health in ways I don't feel I need to with the others.
I've played all healers extensively in EW and I've been doing AST in ultimate now before it gets reworked, and I definitely think the order is something like: 1 - Astro 2 - Scholar 3 - lol 4 - White Mage 5 - Sage Astrologian is really hard to wrap your head around, especially with all of the cards and the pre-planned healing you need, but it's an incredibly good time when you learn how to use lightspeed properly, and that sometimes it's just not worth it to redraw. Scholar is my main and I think it's probably the easiest to fuck up, with a bunch of skills locking you out of other skills, skills meant to be used with one another, and very limited job resources. Not only that, but it's the only job left with actual pet management and you DO need to mess around with Eos a decent bit if you want to be optimal with it. White Mage is comparatively extremely easy and straightforward, being the only healer that can on-demand heal while moving without having a gimped healing output. You get so many lilies that you can just Rapture whenever you need to move and then fit in the extra blood lily during 2 mins for a DPS increase. The only reason Sage is easier than White Mage imo is because it's literally healer summoner. It's a Lego job. You have a Lego for every situation, and when they arrive you just push the Lego. You have so many Legos that you're probably not even taking any damage the entire savage fight and you'll still have mits left over, and you have so many movement tools that you literally don't even need to think about how you're going to pull the movement off in any specific mechanic.
AST definitely has a strong learning curve when you get into optimising it, but once you do it's genuinely such a fun healer and feels good to do the 2 minute rotation with up to 11 weaves depending on RNG. DT rework is taking a lot of that away sadly =/
I prefer shield healers myself, but when in a group with another shield healer (even the same), I usually opt to use shields less and the pure heals more. This allows me to avoid overwriting shields unless things go south. This means with SCH, I use the pure heals of Lustrate, Whispering Dawn, Indomitability, Excogitation (deliberatly when it will heal instead of the countdown fail-safe), and Fey Blessing more frequently with the damage negations of Sacred Soil and Fey Illumination, while my partner healer makes use of their shields. When playing as SGE, I try to stick to Physis, Druochole, Ixochole, and Taurochole, while keeping Kerachole up as much as possible. Makes it harder to keep Toxicons up, but it prevents shield replacing. With regards to SCH itself, I absolutely miss when Energy Drain restores MP instead of HP. That was a boon lost on the SCH's MP management.
the first healer I started with was astro and my biggest issue was that I accidentally removed essential dignity from hotbar somehow 😂 (maybe because I was a curebot when I started 😅) and damn i love the planning aspect of it! its not too hard to recover if something goes wrong since my LoC rng is heavenly and personally it was easy for me to memorize the cards because I didn't know words "bole","spire" & "ewer" haha on a side note though, I was running a dungeon and had an ast healer that was fishing for benefic buff (I personally never use benefic I because it doesn't feel worth it), is it worth trying to get the buff?
As of currently, both WHM and AST have the obsolete heal that gets replaced, benefic I is not worth using even for the buff, there's another video in this channel that has an explanation of this too if you're interested
I don’t enjoy SGE aesthetic enough to try it beyond leveling. Maximizing AST’s damage is hardest for me (controller player), but HP-wise SCH is hardest simply because I am not always great at anticipating which attacks shields are necessary for and which it would be better to DPS through since teammates will be fine.
As someone who plays ast and sch. The amount of mana consumption sch takes makes that job so much harder in my opinion. It can be rough some times. I rarely ever go out of mana on ast, but sch its pretty much every dungeon
As someone who's leveled Sage, Scholar, and Astrologian, in that order, to say I was surprised by their placements would be an understatement. I struggled _a lot_ when playing Sage, but that might be because its really hard to recover when things are going bad, as some other comments also mentioned. Scholar by comparison is far more forgiving. And with Astro, I had a _much_ easier time than either of the shield healers. The cards, which you named as the primary difficulty, can be done very quickly and easily if you know your party composition. To elaborate: In normal party composition, you're slot 1, tank slot 2, then melee, caster, and ranged phys in that order iirc. With quick party targeting courtesy of the F keys, any melee cards can just go to F3 and ranged cards to F4. This expands a bit in 8man, moving melee cards to F5 and ranged cards somewhere after that, but the easy option of F8 always exists. As for the symbols, theres very few cases where you actually need 3/3 to not wipe. 2/3 is plenty, meaning redrawing isnt necessary that often either... unless your party is all melee and you got a ranged card, of course.
Astro was my first healer in any game and I only got into it for “the heart of the cards” 😂 it’s my favorite healer and easiest for me personally after trying them all.
I play white mage and sage in dungeon/criterion and astrologion and scholar in raids /trials. I wish they would let healers switch depending on the set up.
How i play healer seems mana efficient. "If the party i doing the mechanics correctly, all they need is Regen" So far, up to level 70 content, i havent needed anything else, and the tanks, to my knowledge, havent needed as much.
You've been getting Warriors then, waiting for the "nah different tanks" all I see in duties is Warrior now, but even still MP magaement isn't be an issue until players start dying.
@@ishirutaekakura308 its not just warriors, paladin, and dark knight. havent gotten a gun breaker yet. i make sure to have regen up, the reason i think things are going well all the time is the allegan armor is just way too good outside raids.
@@TheKillerman3333GNB feels a bit squishy to heal until the get heart of corundum. Then they basically just excog themselves every 25 seconds so you can play more hands off of them.
Really interesting results. As a sprout who mains tank, I was using a scholar on the side (the 2in1 dps/heal concept was nice). Thought I'd look at sage, and even after watching a few guides, I just found it soooo overwhelming. I've admittedly not really played much of sage as I can't wrap my head around it, but from a strictly newbie point of view, scholar seems far easier at the 70 range because each move seems to be pretty clear on when to use it (aka 1 button for big heal with aether flow, one button for shielding 1 person, 1 button for shielding group etc.) where as sage reads as having many buttons for essentially the same thing so I just dk when to use anything and in what siutation. I dunno. Even after practicing, Sage feels like word salad, while scholar seems to have super clear abilities. I do really wanna try astrologian, will be interesting to see if that one clicks better for me than sage, lol.
What helped me lot when I was learning Sage (as a scholar main), was mapping out my hotbar by comparing spells/abilities. Because both healers are the shielding type, there is predictably going to be similarities in the tooling, this also forces you to really read up on the tooltips and overall sped up learning sage for me. This mapping exercise also helps me organize AST/WHM and allows me to maintain some level of muscle memory around consistent tools like surecast, swiftcast, rez spells, lucid dreaming etc. I think if you have a good understanding of how shields work in the game, Sage should be a fairly easy to pick up.
@@Kuroi295 I think, for me, it's just that all the buttons sound like they do essentially the same thing. It's not the hotbars or prompts I'm struggling with, its what to use in what situation. And even after watching like 3 different guides, I still just don't understand it in the same way that I do most the other classes. I think the trouble with most guides is they explain what moves do, but don't really explain how to properly utilisse the. WeskAlbers one of my faves as he actually shows rotations and explains why things are used in what order, but that happens less with healers because healers are more reactive. I dunno, i'll maybe try again at some point but it might just be a class that aint for m,e.
I learned to heal as an AST, it was the first healer I really wanted to try and its now my main healer, I couldn't mesh with SCH... maybe I will try it again in DT...
its not super relevant, but im a scholar main still early game (going through msq) im level 70, just got to ishgard. since literally like level 50something, i felt like every new skill i got required aetherflow because the job quests for your other skills are locked behind msq. just funny how for about 20 levels nothing changed but what to spend aetherflow on
After leveling all 4 healers to 90 and being pretty much a healer main Though no savage content. Just not enough of the first criterion. My main is White Mage. I like how the job plays overall. Agree on what makes it hard and how it's by far the worst job at 50 or below. My second focus is Sage. I still struggle knowing what cooldowns to use when. I'm not perfect on WHM, but messing up there just means less DPS. Messing up cooldowns as Sage means not enough healing. Haven't done enough Scholar. Leveling was pretty straightforward and easy even. To a point I don't know how to play it well enough. Astrologian is fun. Applying cards demands your constant attention and the healing kit needs some practice and planning to use well.
Yeah, that's about the ranking I expected. Astrologian is the only healer that has a real, honest-to-goodness high APM burst phase, and that burst phase involves reacting to random cards and matching them to the damage profile of whatever jobs you happen to be playing with. It's a thing no one else in the game has to do. The balance spread era was actually easier to play, which feels weird in hindsight. There are at least some complexities to the other jobs, for all that the community loves to kvetch about how easy healing is - Maintaining uptime during movement is an issue on all the healers, more than it is on even Black Mage nowadays. Healers have few instants, and they're often competing for other uses than movement (e.g. Swiftcast for Raise). Sage and White Mage are I think the most constrained, but an Astrologian isn't going to have a great time if they feel they have to lock Lightspeed to burst either. This is felt quite differently by different people. If the idea of substituting in a little extra Ruin 2 or Aspected Benefic doesn't fill you with loathing and you always E. Prog. on every raidwide then moving will be less of a problem. Optimizing involves a lot of tricky work minimizing the distance moved during mechanics and slidecasting through a lot of fire, which can be difficult. - Using the Afflatus spells well is something people find very counter-intuitive. It's the only ability in the game where I've explained how to use it -- specifically that using lilies on pure overhealing during movement or downtime is a gain and why -- and on multiple occasions had people respond with some variant of "that can't possibly be true and I refuse to do that". - Barrier healers have additional responsibilities in higher end content that pure healers generally don't. If some people were killed from full health and you're an Astrologian then that's probably not your problem. If you're a Scholar then it is specifically your problem, and it's your job to figure out how to make them survive the next time. Part of playing well on SGE and SCH involves managing the overall group mitigation, both to keep people alive and so you can avoid spending GCDs on shields that weren't necessary. Doing this well requires carefully planning all of your own non-GCD mitigation and shield abilities, but also knowing the mitigation available to other jobs and coordinating their use with the group.
I mean, you still have Collective unconscious on AST for mitigation help as well and neutral sect if shits really hitting the fan and need a stronger regen and a decently strong shield. Collective always worked well for me when I raided with a sch cohealer at least.
WHM is easily the hardest healer to use in ARR (less so but still true in HW) when synced that low because it has the weakest kit compared to the other healers. For leveling dungeons, Dzemael and Aurum Vale are especially noticeable because Aspected Helios is a lvl 42 unlock and costs less mp and is supported by cards for mp recovery, but Medica II is a lvl 50 unlock and only gets Lucid Dreaming alone while costing more mp. All healers at lvl 50 also have decent ogcd options while WHM's first ogcd is.... Benediction, which you'd struggle to use more than 3-4 times per dungeon.
i have all healers at 90, casual player, and to me whitemage feels the hardest when the group doesnt know what theyre doing. i feel way more comfortable to re-stable the group with astro and scholar, and some extent sage, tho to me AST and SCH are the most comfortable, while i acknowledge WHM and SAG are easier to pick up edit: i miss noct ast
sage is kinda hard for me, in that I keep failing to proc addersting. I'm thinking it's my button placement or I just don't know when to time my shields so they can be broken
@@blanco1co1t I barely use lucid dreaming, lol I play my cards as soon as they are ready As long as you keep your regen up, you’ll barely have to use any heals because healers in EW are too broken lmfao That’s why were deemed useless
astro main. for me sage and scholar are hardest, with probably sage being the worst for me. some of it is understanding the names (i get it's the theme but come on square), a lot of it is MP management. my most hellish dungeon was ketosis with a dark knight who i'm convinced had deleted all their mit buttons from their hotbar.
as someone who has all 4 healers at 90 but mostly plays scholar and astrologian(favoring ast between the two as well), I don't think my opinion on the difficulty of astrologian should count 😅 otherwise I'd be inclined to say it's one of the easier ones. The hardest to learn for me out of the four was sage however because of reasons said in the video (all the buttons are blue, Greek names) but also because the shields are more fragile than sch and the direct healing is weaker than ast/whm it is a balancing act at first before you get the hang of it
Interesting placement of SGE. Playing AST most of the time (probably not optimally at all) I just don't get the job. My monkey-brain can't seem to figure out what the tooltip is actually saying. Way too many interactions with other buffs and spells. Setup my action bars, read the tooltip, cried in monkey, read them again, cried some more and switched back to my AST and am so looking forward to the DT changes
Interesting that these videos could easily be a "Best Designed Jobs, Best to Worst" since the harder jobs are almost always harder due to being poorly designed or outdated
From strictly the endgame standpoint of a veteran omnihealer: SCH is the hardest to do optimal damage with since you need to balance using aetherflow only on E. Drain while keeping the group alive with just faerie heals and recitation. SCH has by far the worst healing toolkit if you don’t want to lose damage. AST is the hardest to actually heal with. Lady of the Crowns being RNG (until dawntrail, praise Yoshi-P) and every good healing tool being HOTs or requiring setup makes it awkward to… actually heal. Especially during 2-min burst.
The randomness of AST card effect both heal and damage, since the card buff and combo can fail (even after they buff the chance), and minor arcana got 50/50 to get what u want. When you redraw an ABA (which is bad, 50% chance in the first place) and got ABB (worse, in another 50% chance)... That ruines lots things. Only 1/4 chance to be optimize... is not quite friendly.
in my opinion it really truly depends on the instance. on the surface, whm and sge are easier to learn but in terms of recovery astro and sch are better imo, and some fights definitely favor one healer over the other. stuff like DSR being doable on sage but a lot easier to prog on scholar, zeromus struggling hard with scholar esp if your coheal is asleep at the wheel, whm really good in uwu but really BAD in ucob. it really depends on what you're talking about
mastering? honestly, scholar is harder than astro imo. a lot of astro is muscle memory/card recognition which you can slowly get better at bc the only thing that truly suffers when you're learning it is your own dps/optimization. scholar tho has things like fairy positioning, not being able to spam heals the second you need them like you can on sage bc of pet ticks, not being able to control WHO gets healed by your drip healing (kardia vs embrace) if you aren't doing weird things with the fairy's range which requires ground clicking, and ofc it actually does have more buttons than astro and yes you do need all of them, including physic....
sage is a lot better at recovery of HP over sch, but sch can brute force many things that sage just physically cannot do. their base shields are not comparable sadly and i say this as a sage main haha, i'm just way more comfortable greeding on sage so i prefer it in environments where i am expected to output my share of damage while mitigating
I’ve only had experience with level 50 content and below with sage, and even at those levels you gotta know each boss fight and well, managing tank pulls that are honestly intended for not a barrier healer (for the love of all that is holy don’t pull the entire dungeon I can’t help and my entire mana pool is munched like a meal with preventing that heath from disappearing in a whole second)
Shield healers do just fine, its just about using your mitigations as mitigations and not just heals. sub 50 sage only has a regen and shields, 50 does get the bubble which should be used basically after the first tick of damage for most effectiveness. sage draws alot of power from being able to, especially at lower levels just be able to dps, while healing safely with even at 50 phlegma, kardia, druochole, soteria. also with sub 50 content specifically im sure a good chunk of the issue is actually new tanks still learning to mit themselves.
@@bradypinnell7782 I know all that, but sometimes tanks really do pull to hard and I have to dump healing on them before I can hit the bubble when the damage isn’t basically bringing their health down to 1\5 health before I can do either of the diagnosis casts. And tanks fully expecting sage to be like white mage with fat healing. It’s actually boss fights though where I fail because I’ll start spacing out with the tank not dying as fast and all I have to do is laser the boss lol
@@Zamerus well, I'm speaking as someone who has leveled every class, multiple times, since before arr even. in end walker especially, every single healer can wall to wall pull on every single dungeon, if geared with even just poetics and random dungeon drops. with the exeptions of sometimes holminsters first pull and mt gulgs last pull.
@@bradypinnell7782 I feel like your misreading me, I'm complaining because I don't like having to focus on only healing during group pulls, which is exactly what wall to walls force me to do, NOT that I can't actually do it
@@Zamerus You initially stated that shield healers were not intended to handle big pulls, and that your mana was an issue, the first part of that very much implies you cannot do it, i wasn't misreading. however most of my points also address simply not wanting to exclusively heal. when i said every healer can handle 99.9% of wall to wall pulls, i mean comfortably, with room to dps plenty, especially with sage as they heal BY dpsing. with the few exceptions i mentioned and i did forget the first endwalker dungeons last mob pull. it is very possible that tanks are mitigating enough, but not every pull and that is also not a point against the healers themselves
To me, Sch is probably the hardest because it lvls with smn. So going from the baby’s first caster and trying to make sense of sch, when it’s already maxed at 90, is a lot. I eventually made an alt to play/lvl sch from the start and still don’t really know what I’m doing compared to the other healing jobs. As nice as it is for one job share the exp for a completion it’s fine but not conducive to learning.
I think more of the issue there is ignoring sch for 60 levels, most people who had interest in both and enjoyed playing both, did just that. that's not really a flaw with the class itself, and as you said if you didn't wanna do what most people would suggest, which is just alternate between them AS you level, then you have the option to either make a new character or just run the dungeons without getting the exp in order. might even be a better experience since you then wouldn't HAVE to run a dungeon multiple times for exp.
@@bradypinnell7782 that’d be ideal but as I’m seeing the sprout experience, as in the sprouts in my fc basically having 1-2 jobs at high lvls while having everything else locked, it’s pretty typical for new people to get comfortable with a couple of jobs and sticking to them. Hell, I think I played smn till 90 and had people telling me I’m losing out on exp if I don’t change it up.
I have every healer to 90 except Astro(67)and I’m struggling with it. It just feels so weak. I know I’m not max level yet so it will probably get better, but it’s the first time I’ve had that “fk it, I’m done” feeling.
Their personal dps will always feel weak. Healing wise though it gets a lot easier when you get earthly star, celestial intersection etc. You have 3 strong heals on minute CDs by level 70 in C.opp Collective and star. Use them on the tank in casual content since you'll have them back before you know it.
I'll be honest I always thought of Scholar and Astro as the easiest 0_0 White mage just seems suuuper intimidating with such a big focus on just healing
At this point WHM is just 3 parts caster 1 part healer - and I'm not even joking. A WHM that has good damage output can rival an average SMN or RDM player with how much damage they can dish out. Also a thing that I often rely on with Astrologian is card play macros. I just need to know who are my party members and what position they are on the party list to throw a card at them. The macro bypasses a lot of the mouse movement required to play a card on someone in the party
Astro is by far the hardest in raids or extremes especially if new to the content. This is because you have to time a couple of your abilities to get the most value. It is also the busiest of the healers.
White mage is easy because you have to many buttons to heal Astro is in the same boat due to its who gimmick is prep time Scholar is a bit harder than Astro as prep and planning are required for every engagement Sage suffers from two things MP consumption and the least amount of methods of healing
One thing I'll say about White Mage healing that isn't being mentioned when it comes to leveling is that Regen is extremely good for those levels before you get Holy, and Holy carries entire dungeons once you get it. The one problem Regen had was it pulling aggro when the tank was gathering mobs, but the devs removed that interaction for Regen, faeries, and Kardia. A White Mage can heal an entire dungeon with just Regen and Cure II easily if they don't care about being perfect with damage output; a Regen spotted onto a DPS when it drops to 2/3rd HP is enough to prop it back up to full health over time. These two spells are efficient enough that you can maintain using them plus Stone/Glare spam as needed with your Lucid Dreaming. It only gets easier once you have Medica II, which (as its reputation is deserved) is extremely strong group healing. It's strong enough that stacking a Medica II and a Regen on a tank before they wall-to-wall can compensate for a huge amount of the damage your tank would suffer on-the-go. I suppose what makes the job have the reputation of being so ridiculously easy is that all the other healing jobs can't really get away with this simplicity. A White Mage can just use Regen and Cure II and do its core job from level 1-90. Anything from there is 'extra'. Admittedly you *should* try to DPS as much as you can, and *should* use other healing/shield options that are more efficient, but you don't *have* to. I'll throw my 2 cents in for each job as I watch the video.
I would argue that Sage and Scholar need to be swapped due to the nature of Kardion. Proper use of Kardia requires dancing the buff around with weaving to move the healing, which is something a faerie does automatically without input. The faerie also performs its healing automatically without requiring input; if there's somebody in range to heal, it heals. It's such a no-fuss system. A Sage has a strange healing system compared to the others. Ideally you want to perform all your healing with OGCDs and Kardia, meaning you want to be highly aware of your cooldowns and how to efficiently space them. This is due to the nature of Kardia vs the faerie; a faerie will keep healing while you heal, but Kardia stops providing its bonus healing if you stop and perform healing/shielding. Due to this, you are punished a lot more for having to hard-cast healing at any point as a Sage. This is somewhat complicated by addersgall. It incentivizes you to use your shields and charge it, but putting up your shields at any point except before pulls or during fight downtime is a loss. This means that a Sage has to learn when dropping a Eukrasian shield is a net gain. Scholar also has the advantage of Art of War being so damned good for pulls that they don't have to do anything else. Use Sacred Soil, weave Lustrate as needed, be near the tank, and slam Art of War on the enemies, and they can perform almost the entire game's content. Swap Art of War for Biolysis/Broil on single targets and you're fine. People like to huff and say that it's a choice between Lustrate and Energy Drain, but they're being ignorant or dishonest a lot of the time; usually you're using your charges on Sacred Soil and spotting heals with Lustrate, because if you don't spot heals with Lustrate you have to perform the odd hard-cast heal, and (since Energy Drain is only 100 potency) that's a net loss. It's only a 'thing' when you have a co-healer. Sage, on the other hand, has an array of things to do during the pull. They can't rely on just Sacred Soil, their faerie, and one weaved heal in Lustrate to handle it all. They have to think like a reverse tank and stagger their cooldowns, all while tracking a larger array of AoE damage spells. One thing you also didn't touch on was how Sacred Soil is a lot more powerful that Kerachole due to the hidden mechanic of buff application. Sacred Soil actually applies a secret instant tick for 100 potency, meaning its healing is 100 potency higher, and the damage reduction lingers for 2-3 extra seconds after the area fades, meaning its mitigation lasts longer. This might not sound like much, but with how powerful Kerachole and Sacred Soil are before taking this into consideration, it bumps Sacred Soil up to ludicrous levels.
Astrologian is an odd healer in the sense that if you only do what a White Mage does (Aspected Benefic, Benefic II, Aspected Helios) you can mimic what makes a White Mage simple, and complicate it in steps to get comfortable with it. Once you take into account Essential Dignity, I would argue that Astrologian is one of the easiest healers to play at skill floor. Where Astrologian gets difficult is when you do anything more than that, and it suffers from severe button bloat. I believe one of the most difficult aspects of the class is finding enough comfortable key bindings to not click your abilities. It's simply that engorged with things to do. In practice, however, if you just dole out your cards with a priority system, use Essential Dignity, and heal like a White Mage, you'll do fine. Smatter in the other spells and weaves slowly as you get comfortable and it becomes second nature. It is definitely the hardest healer if you try to reach the skill ceiling, absolutely, but if you're not doing things like, say, monitoring the Dark Knight's burst phase to card them, or using some sort of abacus to monitor your party's DPS to determine the best Samurai to put physical cards on, then Sage honestly can compete in difficulty. A lot of the late-game healing just becomes "Place star, throw blue cards on melee and purples on casters, be a White Mage with Essential Dignity". I would argue that ED is so damned good that it is worth the card business just to have it in your kit. Anything else you do feels 'extra'.
One hard thing about White Mage MP management is that Thin Air, as powerful as it is, doesn't do much except MP management. Other healers have their MP management baked into their kit, while WHM only has Assize to regen MP while doing something else. You need to go out of your way to regen MP.
I honestly can't see whm being easier than sage (but maybe i'm biased and haven't played whm enough), and yes i started with sage as my first healer and for the first few runs it quite rough to get used to having quite a few buttons and "everything looks the same color/design" but it clicked for me quite quickly because how with sage you can quite literally turn your brain off and get away with nearly every combination of buttons in any order you can think of. When comes to whm, though it's easy like sage, to me it's noticeably harder than sage. Many of the whm spells are super mana hungry, mana management is significantly harder as you have more buttons to press, whm is much less mobile than sage at almost any level range, and i like i said before, sage can get away with mostly any combination/order of spells while whm (and even more true for sch and ast) cannot.
As someone who only does Tank and DPS, here's the list based on what I've run into: 1. Easiest: Scholar 2. White Mage 3. Astrologian 4. Hardest: Sage Sage is mainly the pre-planning required to prevent future hits. Ast isn't too complex until you do the cards, and it appears that is easier in Dawntrail. White Mage is the standard. Scholar is a little easier with your fairy heals (but Scholars in Dawntrail have been way worse overall, focusing too hard on damage).
Kinda crazy that people consider sage easier to play than Scholar. Scholar fairies literally heal constantly and will be able to pick their targets based on priority. Sage gets ONE target for their bonus heal, and they need to use a skill to swap it. They also lack the sheer healing potential of a Scholar, given that Scholar can stick regens / AoE heals and combine them with guaranteed crits and emergency tactics for swapping shields with heals - which is seriously NEEDED in some content where you need to top a character off to remove doom. I'd argue Sage is probably the hardest to use effectively while WHM and AST are the easiest. In my humble opinion.
I personally do not like energy drain. At all. I dont like trading healing for barely a worthwhile amount of damage and unless I have aetherflow again, I'm always saving them for healing.
I must be doing something wrong with Sage, because in dungeon pulls I feel like no matter what I do the tank always drops low, and then I've spent all my cooldowns so if anything actually goes _wrong_ I have to spam GCD healing and it takes a while to stabilize again. On the flipside, I play both Scholar and Astrologian, and with both of them I rarely struggle to keep up with tanks unless I'm making mistakes. I've only gotten Sage to level 76, but do higher levels make that much of a difference?
might seem like its a dig, but i dont mean it that way, are you using kardia? and by that i dont mean just applying it, you know abcs. always be casting, with that they effectively have permanent free regen that you can buff every like 60 secs. I love shield healers and dont play sage because its too little to think about for me, especially in dungeons. but besides abcs, using most of your ogcds as mits rather than heals helps alot, especially when combined with your shields, i bubble off cd, and youre generally free to do more damage than the other healers since you're mostly ogcds and mits and kardia, which should result in things dying faster and more cds being available all around. also generally speaking the healing front across the board gets easier in dungeons the later you get as tanks are nigh unkillable and most dps have 1 or 2 heals even, while you're also gaining more tools
@@bradypinnell7782 Fair question, but the issue isn't kardia because I'm pretty good at staying on top of enemies with attacks. Maybe I'm using mits in the wrong combinations? I try using things like kerachole + soterion, but it never seems like enough and I have to use more. Or am I supposed to always maintain 3+ mits/buffs on the tank for the whole pull?
@@javi7636 personally, as a shield healer myself, i try not to stack % mits if i can help it, the tank is likely already mitting a bit and there is diminishing returns, instead i couple it with shields, say someone has 20% mit up and you shield for 100 pot, its then effectively worth 120 pot, where as stacking mits actually hurts the pot of the mit. it will also help to keep an eye on your tanks buffs, getting familiar with their big cds can let you know when to not stack your own big cds on and instead shield till their own mit wears off, then apply your own
@@javi7636 generally speaking for dungeons, flat healings value does not change based on your mits, so while i have a mit up, i will lean more towards shielding than healing, when i have no mits available, that is when i would use things like pneuma. i will always kerachole instead of ixochole, if i have the choice as the regen will be more healing, and it includes a mit. stuff like pepsis can also be used if a shield is about to expire, but still has some value left on it. you can rotate between haima and panhaima, even on mob pulls where the dps shouldnt be getting it. its similar to tank in that you really dont need to save all your cooldowns till the boss, much better to find a pattern so they come off cd around when youd need them in the boss, rather than not using them
@@bradypinnell7782 I'm still leveling so I don't have panhaima, pneuma, or enhanced kerachole (and other things when synced down for roulettes). But I noticed that haima is super strong, so I definitely need to use that more consistently. It's also possible that I'm waiting too long before applying mits. I'll experiment more when I get back home.
WHM was by far the easiest. I could do major DPS with minimal effort and the heals felt super potent, and I hardly ever needed to hardcast. AST had potent heals but DPS felt challenging, and SCH felt like a lot of work for less potent offense and defense.
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As someone who considers themselves a Scholar main, who also has Sage at 90, I've found Sage easier when things are going right, but more difficult when things are going wrong.
Maybe I don't understand Sage as well, but it feels like Sage is less able to recover bad situations. As Scholar you can combine Recitatation, Emergency Tactics and Succor for a potent AoE heal, or use Recitation, Adloquim and Deployment Tactics if you know a big AoE is about to hit. Sage doesn't quite seem to have these options.
Sage has similar yet different options.
For example, eukrasian prognosis then pepsis heals very effectively, especially if combined with ixochole.
Another option is Zoe into pneuma which is a 900 potency raid heal that has the possibility of critting as well! 🤔😊
That doesn't mean that you should find it easier to play sage. I imagine it is a case of being better acquainted with Scholar so you can more easily think on the fly when things go wrong! 😊
On that topic, I think damage control is important part of what makes a healer easy or difficult, especially in casual context where things may often not go remotely close to the plan (if there is a plan to begin with). And given I know nothing about Scholar - Sage does have good set of tools to recover from a "party in a bad spot" situation (like having only half of the group alive for multistack marker), but can struggle if you're trying to keep one person alive despite their best efforts - something I found White Mage excels at.
Sage honestly is the hardest healer if you walk into a dungeon/raid you don't know as sage is very big on being proactive. This will be very obvious when DT hits and most of your sage gonna struggle for a while. There are really good sage that knows how to deal with bad situations and have six sense for raid wides/random damage.
You can spam the basic aoe heal spell (prognosis) either with or without eukrasia (if shields are already on); it has x1.5 the pure healing potency of scholar's succor. Then quickly after Eukrasia+prognosis applies shield to party you can pop them with pepsis to give an even larger heal. Sage generally has so many cooldowns that at least 1 is always useable to you. Same as with tanks mitigations, don't use them all at once but try to spread them out over time.
RecitAdlo with Deployment is a favourite of mine for big raidwides. I've been able to mitigate attacks to the point that health bars don't even move. Having played all the healers, Scholar is absolutely my favourite
I've levelled Scholar, White Mage and Astro up to lvl 90, in that order. Haven't touched Sage yet. Weirdly, White Mage was actually by far the hardest time I had with the levelling process. In casual content, Scholar feels incredibly forgiving, because while it might be tough to make use of ALL of its kit properly, you can often get by simply with the Faerie autos and an Adlo or two - the only real time you NEED to go harder than that is on gigapulls, or on some of the trickier Normal Raids. Once you get Lustrate it's over, you barely even need to think about anything. Trying to play Scholar *well* is tricky, but playing it *well enough* is absolutely trivially easy IMO.
White Mage felt like a big jump up in difficulty for me because suddenly I was responsible for keeping a close eye on health bars and reacting, rather than letting my Faerie do all the work and applying the occasional shield when I knew a big mechanic was coming up - you have to heal much more actively than Scholar does. It was especially difficult because - as mentioned in the video - White Mage relies on GCD heals for a LOT of its levelling process, and if you get a bit carried away DPSing you might end up in a race against the health bar going down, especially before you get Holy. I don't know if by the time I levelled Astro I was just more used to the pure healer playstyle or what, but I had a lot less trouble with it. I think Essential Dignity unlocking so early really helps, especially considering how powerful a tool it is. I also think maybe since applying cards involves keeping a closer eye on your party member I don't have the issue of not realizing my tank is dying like I do with WHM.
I'm having the opposite issue. WHM for me is trivially easy. All I really need to do is throw on two regens on the tank during mob pulls and slap him with one of the 3 ogcd heals I have when he gets low and spam holy until then. The stun acts as a significant amount of mitigation and the regens slow the damage enough that I can throw in plenty of holy before I need to top the tank back up. When it comes to barrier healers I fond it more difficult to know when and how to place their abilities and often it results in me having to focus on the tank more to keep them from dying. I often feel like the abilities are under powered because of this.
I just leveled my dark knight and it’s mind blowing how bad people are at scholar. I also found it the most fun healer to level. WHM was so boring with the GCD heals
I still feel WHM is the easiest, but there is a lot to be said for Eos. I think the problem with SCH is a lot of people try to play it when leveling like they are at level 90. They try to optimize Energy Drain, fill every GCD with Ruin/Broil, and avoid GCD heals. But if you...don't do that, if you use Lustrate and Adlo and even PHYSICK, it works far far better. Outside of that, learning to use oGCDs. If you treat oGCDs as emergency buttons, SCH (and SGE) are going to be a hard time. But if you hit them early and often and all the time? Much more powerful Jobs.
WHM can be easier since Holy stun x3 gives you a lot of wiggle room and if you pop Presence of Mind, Thin Air, and just start throwing out Cure 2s (with Solace and Tetra when they are up), your target basically cannot die, even if it's a DRK using no mitigation. Once you run out of MP? Maybe. But until you do, you can keep almost anyone alive. No other healer really has the ability to do that as well as WHM. The problem is when people try to play SCH/AST/SGE like WHM. Or, as I said above, try to play them like they're level 90 when you're in a level 40 dungeon and don't have those tools yet and don't need to optimize for damage such that chain casting Cure 2 IS allowed. : )
I have entered endwalker with sage........
Stormblood has😢taken away my love for the sch....I still have a mini PTSD remembering .....I switched to astro.....shadowbringer has made me forget astro I switched to whm omegod....
After learning sage I got melancholy about sch so I have switched to sch.....
And out of the all 4 whm is the job I find harder to play
But I'm used to preventing
And not responsive healing
So it is something that is harder for me....😢
@SubduedRadical that's the old school for sch lustrate aldo psychic and energy drain to manage the mana aka mp
A tip that has helped me immensely for astrologian on controller is you can set up a cross hotbar section available by holding both triggers and then placing card macros in there to use Play on the macro'd target. It might mean no double weaving with play but it saves so much spam on the up and down buttons.
Aw, man, I learn this just as we're about to lose it for Dawntrail, now that we get three "Play" buttons. :(
@@charlesheywood8314 Yeah, that's def not gonna be doable. Three play buttons for 8 teammates? That's... way too many macros.
@@Scerttle
No, you can consolidate them. Just need to fashion them in order on who to cast.
@@Scerttle
Here's a macro I came up with:
micon "Play I"
merror off
mlock
Play I
Play II
Play III
Astral Draw
Umbral Draw
Theoretically, it should work properly. UA-cam shadowbans my posts, hopefully, this one won't.
@@Xport9 Hm, I have to admit I don't know how mouseover works on controller, but that could definitely work.
I main AST, and I love the busyness (and am grieving for that very thing in DT), but I remember when I was first learning, I thought I was going to lose my mind over the APS. Now, that's the fun part!
honestly, playing AST is the only thing preventing me from falling asleep in dungeons....
@@NikopolAUAST is only fun in casual content when people start screwing up and you actually have a reason to start using your tools to keep them alive. I encourage dps to eat vuln stacks at this point in casual content.
I'm also grieving for that, AST is the only healer which keeps me engaged and has something fun to offer - doing the optimised 2 minute rotation perfectly is such a feel good moment, especially when it's RNG and can be done from 7 to 11 weaves depending on if you need to redraw or not, etc.
But of course, it got simplified going into EW from ShB, and yet again it's being simplified. I'll be quitting healing because of it.
Something else to mention is that astro is one of the few classes where practicing your burst properly on a dummy isn't feasible, can make it really rough to learn
I think the main issue with Ast is the high level of weaving that the card system makes you do that any amount of spell speed makes it absolutely misable to casually optimise. I've just ignored my GCD timer sometimes to just handle the cards because weaving draw 1, seeing the card icon and figuring out whether you want melee/ranged(add extra time if you have to pick between multiple of the same spilt), selecting the dps and using play and getting back on the boss is not very easily squashed within a single GCD window. there's likely an easier solution the comminity has frankensteined to make it quicker but I'm not sure if I want to set up an entire hotbar set up just to squish AST only things when I can just play another healer and not have to worry about that at all.
Astrologian definitely has the most things to keep track of, the most extensive set of tools, and the most frustrating peculiarities (being so busy with the card targeting and still having to go back and re-center your target for Gravity in a pack of enemies will always annoy me), but something about it just clicks for me and makes it easy for me to understand. Comparatively I can't wrap my head around Scholar no matter what, so that got my vote.
Though if I can doompost for a bit, Astrologian doesn't seem like it's going to get much of a fix in Dawntrail. I like the card changes and new abilities on paper, but the way they implemented everything just seems... incomplete. To go over a few things that catch my attention:
-Loss of one draw every minute and Astrodyne leaves it with a 1250 MP per minute deficit after factoring in the draws we get and Lucid Dreaming. With slight variance depending on spell speed and piety, an Astrologian will run out of mana in 8 minutes, assuming optimal MP regeneration and doing nothing more MP-intensive than Malefic/Combust every GCD.
-The new draw patterns encourage either dumping your entire starting four cards ASAP (which doesn't make its already busy opener any less busy) or just outright ignoring The Arrow and The Spire to use Lord of Crowns and The Balance for the damage, switch to Umbral Draw quicker, and get to The Spear during raid buffs. The latter can become an issue if you're mid-cast when Astral/Umbral Draw comes off cooldown, since any delay to those is going to start drifting The Spear out of buff windows.
-To add onto the last point, the fact that the opener/burst is still so busy means that Lightspeed is still required for double-weaving in buff windows. The 90-second cooldown is still superfluous since you will always want to wait the extra 30 seconds; single-weaving during Astrologian's burst just isn't an option.
-Malefic got a damage buff but Macrocosmos didn't, meaning Macrocosmos is now a DPS loss.
-Losing two damage buff cards (one on the odd minute, one on the even minute) and Astrodyne hurts pretty bad when Astrologian is already the worst healer for personal DPS. All it got to replace them are a buff to Lord of Crowns (150 extra potency), the extra hit after Divination (600 potency), and a few more seconds on Divination to bring it up to 20 seconds like they're doing to lots of raid buffs. I think overall it'll struggle to break even with its old rDPS, while other jobs are getting more damage tools and overall increases to their own DPS.
-Sun Sign is locked behind Neutral Sect, which, while Neutral Sect is very powerful on paper, is something that a good Astrologian really never needs to use outside of high-end content. Since you ideally want to never use Aspected Helios or Aspected Benefic if you can get by with your oGCD options and Macrocosmos, that means that if you want to use Sun Sign you'll either be burning Neutral Sect mid-fight just to get access to it without actually making use of Neutral Sect itself, or just popping Neutral Sect pre-pull to get the shield on the tank with Aspected Benefic and get the Suntouched proc for Sun Sign for mid-fight.
-This one's more of a personal nitpick, but The Spear going from a melee-focused damage buff to a ranged-focused damage buff is going to confuse the hell out of me for a while. No clue why they couldn't keep the two damage buff cards consistent with ones they already had in Endwalker.
A lot of these issues seem like oversights (the MP issue and Macrocosmos's lack of potency increase especially) that can be easily fixed, but it doesn't fill me with confidence that we got this close to release and through the media tour with all of these glaring issues, especially considering that the changes... really didn't make the job any easier, just slightly different. I'd hardly even call it a rework, all that really changed is that you traded two damage cards and RNG for four non-damage cards and lack of RNG.
I agree with a lot of your points, especially the neutral sect thing. square should know better than to lock stuff behind gcd heals, since players are constantly optimizing to AVOID burning gcd on redundant healing that could be otherwise covered by oGCDs.
@Larry. Agreed. Neutral sect is such overkill for any casual content that it's easy to forget about it and even in savage and ultimates, you really just want to avoid it if you can. It's a good button if your cohealer goes down or you need to solo heal a certain phase but having a dps skill locked behind it just means now we're going to be burning neutral sect every 2 minutes regardless of whether it's a waste or not.
@@matrinezkevin11492 here's to hoping it's damage neutral so we can use it when we need to and save it when we don't (like sage pneuma against single target)
@@matrinezkevin11492 The Neutral Sect followup is Sun Sign, which is mitigation. The new damaging ability is a followup to Divination.
As a WHM main, I agree it feels the easiest. One thing not mentioned about its kit in the video is Divine Benison, an instant ability that lets you drop a small shield on a target, which has 2 charges at high level. It makes WHM the fastest healer at shielding one specific person (which can be themselves!). At higher levels we can also combo it with Aquaveil, our single-target damage reduction ability. Double tapping Benison and Aquaveil on a target about to take a big hit (like that poor DPS who keeps getting vuln stacks) can be the difference between having to cast Raise or not. This tiny bit of "shield healer" kit that WHM has also helps with riding the line on Holy's cast to stun time, as a Divine Benison is a 500 potency shield, which compares favorably to Tetragrammaton 's 700 potency heal.
By comparison SCH and SGE feel a little more sluggish with their shields (in casual content!), where I may use them perfectly based on the boss mechanics, but then have to scramble to help that one party member who keeps failing mechanics. I can partly get around that by singling out the struggling party member for priority on shields at the cost of general party shielding, but it's rough if there's more than one person having trouble with the fight.
I agree at low levels WHM can feel slow, but once we have Regen at 35, we effectively have our own "fairy", at least for babysitting the tank, as Regen is a 250 HOT compared to the Fairy's 180 potency Embrace (at the cost a GCD every 18s). We just have to be a bit more active in watching the rest of the party's HP! At at those low levels, we can't do anything else on the run (besides tagging mobs with Aero), so keeping Regen on the tank is free. You can also use it like an instant Cure 1, though unlike an AST's Aspected Benefic it doesn't heal when it's applied. It's still a good way to patch up a DPS without wasting the time or MP of a Cure 2 on them.
Hmm, a two charge small shield and a single target mitigation which can be combined. If only astro had the same abilities with different names...
@@aethon0563 do you reply to all comments like this or are you just that bad at baiting people?
@@biggrayalien4791 ah, the irony.
Fastest sage shield is hamia and that's not worth wasting on a tank buster, better for pulls
@@aethon0563 pov: you go out of your way to be miserable
Astro is FANTASTIC this expansion and their ogcds work far differently from whm. The fact you do this to yourself only process you're lacking experience with both of them and nothing will make you happy
One other thing that helps me with Sage VS Scholar is the amount of hardcasts you have to do. I can constantly fish for crit E.Diagnosis between pulls with Sage in a way that I just can't with SCH, or put party-wide shields up _while_ moving for a mechanic. Icarus is also an immense help for fixing positioning mistakes that NONE of the other healers have (yet).
That said, you can almost completely avoid hardcasts at all with SCH. If you have Aetherflow stacks but your cooldowns are all available, you quite literally can carry up to 10 stacks' worth of healing, which is absurd (3 in gauge, next Aetherflow on standby, Dissipation on standby, Recitation + Excog on standby).
Slight tangent but as iconic as it is, I really wish Holy was a blind and not a stun. Whenever I play melee DPS or Tank its so annoying to have a mob I want to interupt be immune to stuns because of DR caused by the WHM. Making it a blind would essentially do the same thing of "reducing" the damage enemies do without causing DR on stuns. (If that's how DR in ff14 works anyways).
That would work yes! Although it is worth mentioning blind would only be a chance! I still like the idea though! 😁
Holy applying a blind would be really funny given the animation.
better yet just get rid of the status effect and reduce the cast time to 1.50
@@CaetsuChaijiCh I don't quite remember from the paladin flash days, but wasn't blind something like 90% chance to miss? I can't imagine it being less than 60%.
@Mikrowelliger hmm I am not sure, but given that blue mages can apply blind, this is something that could be tested 🤔
My point was more that it would in a way be a nerf? 😅😊
I heard white mage was easiest so when I got into healing went there first. I was struggling. Turns out barrier is best for me. Sch in early game then I got to sage and it’s my love my heart my everything. I love it more than tanking. It’s my go to.
Ive gone in alliance raids as a scholar and had a sage partner
One was purely out to cause me specifically a hard time
During a boss aoe, i applied my strong shield combo, did recitation adlo, and spread all the shield to the party
The sage, used the eukrasian prognosis, on me only, and reduced my shield intensly
Didnt bother anyone else tho
But everytime i did the strong shield, eukrasian prog was put on me and me alone
Different raid, i had a tank friend tell me when he was going to get the alliance tank buster and i wanted to test my scholars sheild strength
I did shield combo, rescued the tank to me so it was just me and him, he had the tbaoe, i stayed with him
I lived, with shield left over
That is a weird sage certainly! I imagine it was eukrasian diagnosis if it hit only you though! Still weird!
I was in a similar situation, however, in my situation, the sage kept applying it to the whole alliance but only after i applied a shield, never before my shield. Then they apologized for it but kept doing it. The apology meant nothing to me because the behavior didn't change.
@@CaetsuChaijiCh I'll admit, even tho I do play sage often I do get a bit confused which is the AOE shield and which is the single shield when NOT on the gme
@@ZianaSue I had also one sage that would apply a Zoe and then not do anything until I have put up shields
Around the last boss I saw the Zoe, I used succor and then they applied their shield, then did the crit shield spread and they actively called me out in alliance chat about them wasting a Zoe because I didn't give them the "strong shield boost"
Apparently they thought if scholars gave a shield, when they use Zoe to overwrite a scholar shield, it turns all the shield into mitigation
........hmm, told them to go read the updates for sage and scholar
that sounds like the single targeted shield and not the aoe one, that's super weird. I try to be mindful as sage if a scholar applies their shields first, that sage just sounds like a jerk :(
Still got my weird inverted mentality with White Mage; that job I just CAN'T with....but Astro? Yea I can run that no problem 😂
My personal beef with White Mage centers on a couple things I did:
1. Leveling from 30-50 WITHOUT doing the Job Quests for other skills (No Regen, No Cure 3, No Holy)
2. Aurum Vale......nuff said.
3. Rando tanks that pull EVERYTHING in Aurum Vale.
@@trevorromein14so... You failed yourself and you failed yourself...?
That doesn't mean the class is bad lol, that's on you. Ofc the class will feel bad if you're missing the unlockables the game expects you to have. Next I'll see a marauder at 50 and change the warrior job.
My very first experience was whm and even I got aurum vale it was a cake walk though I got it during my time in shb.
Here's a protip: use Regen.
Another protip: you can use the stun from holy to apply Regen, medica 2, cure 2 on the tank before the mobs recover
Played all healers during savage progress this exp and astro it's the hardest just for the rng part but when u can exploit marcocosmos it's the best thing ever (loved getting no brain clears on P3).
Another thing with astro being hard it's that a first glance it's hard to tell if u are doing well dps wise even looking at Act and it's the healer that gets impacted the most by how others play.
Yeah that makes sense. You wouldn't know if you are doing well from act exactly because so much of the ast value is in what everyone else is doing too!
And exactly because of healers being impacted by everyone else, sometimes if it looks like a healer is doing poorly, it's actually because john black mage decided to not dodge a mechanic a few too many times 😂
I am John black mage
@@CaetsuChaijiChyeah 6% extra damage can vary wildly in value depending on whether it's 6% of an amazing dps or 6% of my trash ass dps. AST really lives and dies by how well their raid group does even in the healing department with their VERY strong oGCDs that can carry you through pretty much any fight assuming people aren't eating too much extra damage for no appreciable gain.
Sage and Astro are so scary for me. I have such healer anxiety already, but White Mage was so easy levelling where it was almost entirely 'drop medica2, drop regen on the tank'. Every now and then I'd have to cure 3 for party wides or dropping a shield on someone when it comes up. I only had one wipe my entire time getting it to 90. Meanwhile... I have at least 1 wipe a day with Sage (wiped twice on ToZ in a single run, even... ugh), even when I'm hitting literally all of the buttons until I'm doing the basic heal. Having levelled 2 healers in a row, I'm saving Astro for after Dawntrail comes out 😅
Not touching scholar at all outside of the job quests lmao. Blessed be Summoner.
I think the reason why you're struggling so much with sage and scholar is that you're treating them like White mage. Their heels are not quite as strong as White mage, so you might struggle if you let the tank get on really low HP all the time and expect to heal it instantly. With sage and scholar, you want to start healing the tank when it gets to like 50 or 60% HP. Also, you can use Shields proactively, and place them before damage
I personally view Sage as a weird variation on a regen healer. You're not gonna do big burst heals, but you're great at having a constant throughput on heals. Haima and panhaima are pretty much a regen shield, and you can swap Kardia around to help top off people who need heals. And with Sage getting the AOE Kardia button in DT, it seems their doubling down on that regen healer style for Sage.
something that people keep skipping over when comparing sage and scholar is that eukrasia makes shielding on the move much easier and paired with icarus makes the job very mobile and zoomy
astro main here. it's always weird hearing people say that astro is hard, but because i've only tried white mage and astro, i just see it as the more interesting option.
You are free to think that but white mage is the superior healer all around & thats not opinion, its fact.
If its harder content, whm is perfect for it whereas sage or ast takes a certain level of proficiency that doesnt make it more interesting, just different than a pure healer & easier to work in low level dungeons because whm flourishes at level 50+ content because the healing becomes a lot better.
@@sammicopor That... is not fact.
They're well-balanced enough that the call between White Mage and Astrologian for high-end content comes down to whichever one can handle particular fight mechanics better, and the choice can vary from fight to fight.
In a vacuum, Astrologian is better because it brings more damage and utility overall than White Mage, while in practice, like I mentioned, it depends on which one is the best for a particular fight.
White Mage also has a VERY awkward growth period throughout the leveling process. Its only oGCD heal at level 50 is Benediction, which has an insanely long cooldown. It doesn't get its main job gimmick until 52, and doesn't get a way to make up for the damage loss from Afflatus Solace until 74. By that point Astrologian has pretty much already gotten enough tools to sustain a party in normal content without using any GCD heals in place of attacking.
You can absolutely prefer one to the other, like how I definitely prefer Astrologian, but there is no "fact" that points to White Mage being superior, especially "all around" when Astrologian brings better damage and more tools.
In raw healing, White Mage is always gonna be SE's favorite, but Astro vs. White Mage overall, Astro IS better.
You've got lightspeed, Card Buff, Macrocosmos, etc.
What makes Astro superior is it's recovering ability in high end content. You've got a bunch of morons having issues with mechs? Dude, Astro's recovery and ability to regen MP to keep recovering people's asses is insane. This is specifically in parties having a hard time, BUT even in parties that are doing well, as a pro Astro, I still carry my WM co healer in everything.
If you know what you are doing as an Astro, it tops WM any day.
@@sammicopor This... is not fact.
The two jobs are pretty well-balanced, to the point where the choice between them for high-end content comes down to which one interacts more favorably with raid-specific mechanics. Outside of those specifics instances, in a vacuum, Astrologian is the clear winner with more utility, more oGCD heals, higher raid DPS, a smoother leveling experience (courtesy of getting Essential Dignity so early), etc.
You can prefer one to another, sure, but calling it "fact" is just wrong, especially not "all over" when the ONLY things White Mage has over Astrologian are raw healing potency and personal DPS.
But guuyyysss, he said it's a fact. It's not like people would go on the internet and just tell lies, right?
As someone who started as an arcanist, my first experience healing in the game was with a scholar healer. Yes, the tech gets pretty advanced as you level, but being down aetherflow stacks, as opposed to addersgall stacks, doesn't really feel that bad for me. Being down your special resource isn't as punishing on a scholar, but then again, it was my first healer to level, so I'm biased. Sage is still hella fun, don't get me wrong. But reci excog is my favorite combo for healers. I should point out that I do have both Sage and Scholar at 90, with Astro being lvl 73 and I just got White Mage to 70. I just know it was fun to pull things like Haukke Manor with my fairy literally doing all of the healing. Early level dungeons with scholar is insanely easy, especially in dungeon levels before WHM or AST get their regens. I will say the fact that SCH has the least amount of damaging options compared to any of the other healers is a major drawback, I still say the job is fairly simple if you read your tooltips and get proactive rather than reactive. Neither SCH or SGE play well reactively if you are out of resources. You gotta know what's coming.
I mostly agree with this difficulty ranking.
AST is at the top for a few reasons. The cards are the biggest reason, but also having to time certain things, and the fact that the aoe attack is targeted. Every other healer can just target the tank and spam their attack.
I do rank SCH as harder than SGE, but the fairy isn't a factor. I'd rather deal with the fairy than have to juggle Kardia. In Dawntrail the Kardia juggling will be at least partially mitigated by Philosophia. When I play healer I prefer to play SCH, but Philosophia might change that.
Where my rankings differ is with SGE and WHM, as I find SGE to be easier.
On a side note, SGE shields overwriting SCH shields really needs to be fixed. As a SCH I'm in pain every time I get a SGE cohealer, because they will consistently overwrite my shields. They don't even think about it, Eukrasian Prognosis is their default, even though they have to push an extra button to access it.
SCH main, and I agree about SGE co-healer. Less of an issue in say Labyrinth, but I’ve left trial groups before due to being paired with SGE. The pairing is sub optimal and adds unnecessary challenges to higher level encounters
As someone who has leveled SCH, SGE, and WHM to 90, I can only speak to those 3. But, here's my thoughts, briefly:
SCH: This was a fun leveling experience because Eos (RIP Selene, but no one used you anyways...) was very useful for quick heals. At the higher levels though, I found some of the additional skills didn't click with me. I always forgot which is the emergency skills to use in what situations. The Fairy skills sometimes didn't feel as impactful. But overall, it was a solid healing class.
SGE: Once I got past the confusing colours/names of the skills (yes, this was overwhelming at first and deterred me from playing it for a LONG time), I found a great flow with SGE. Even starting at level 70, it doesn't really start to "work" until closer to 80. I've also found that more than the other 2 healing classes I've played, SGE has a much higher APM. Needing to press Eukrasia to add shields becomes a lot, especially when trying to upkeep it on the tank so you can get Addersting to do high damage, I feel like it has become arthritis inducing. Lol. I do find it more challenging than the others due to the APM, but I think it flows more smoothly once you get used to it.
WHM: Honestly, a very straight forward class, with not much going on, even at high levels. So many of the added features at the higher levels feel "meh." Aside from spamming Holy (the ONLY AOE attack that also requires a cast time, unlike SCH and SGE) to get the stun, I get bored with it. The being said, it's not a bad class. I just slowly lost the desire to play it.
The difficulties of Astrologian have been *amazing* for my ADHD, giving me a minigame of sorts to play while I'm playing the game and quieting that part of my mind while I'm busy actively focusing on the fight. It's a weird balance but I got *very* good at it and enjoy the business of it. I'm a little sad they took away that, and am afraid it'll become as "boring". It's a learning curve, but I don't know that everything should be "easy".
Omg this words it so well! Same on all fronts!
I don't have ADHD, buuut I'm coming back from WoW, where I kinda got used to the super tiny GCD. So Astro's been nice for me. Plus once I memorized what card was what, it just became "does this go on the melee DPS or the ranged?"
@@AkaAkoVT exactly!! I'm more mad I have to rememorize the cards now
@@thewitchiebunny Honestly, it's just really fun buffing people :D
Buuut yeah. Gonna take some getting used to
This is me! I found I really liked ninja for the same reason. Just give me extra button mini game on the side and I am having a good time.
As someone who just doesn't click with SCH at all I was a little worried when SGE came along as I was thinking it was maybe that I wouldn't click with shield healers at all.. but I really quickly ended up having no issues with SGE at all. The concept of having something of a "toggle" button that changed ability functions just made sense to me right from the start. While I'm not a healer main by any stretch, I would actually choose SGE over either WHM or SCH because it just feels "right" to me. AST is still my favourite, though, and when I heal I always prefer AST even if it can be a struggle.
I fully understand this can be addressed in an upcoming video, but the changes to astro for Dawntrail are incredibly controller friendly. Play 1 can be assigned to DPS and that only needs to be pressed once every 60 seconds (or twice every 2 minutes under optimal play). The other play buttons are basically for tanks in optimal scenarios or flexible buttons for party members if the need arises. Significantly better than giving a card on a 60 second timer and 3 cards on a 2 minute timer under ideal conditions.
Don't let astro discourage you from trying the class.
For those AST on controller players: Macro your Card stuff.
First I have a Macro to stack up Draw and Redraw.
More importantly, Play takes you to a dedicated xbar with numbers 1-8. These buttons Play the current card to the player in that numbered slot, or with fewer party members, 5-8 go to 1-4. Then you get shunted back to your regular bar. Makes AST playable imo.
For someone who sucks in healing and i am terrible the job list in my pov is sge>whm>ast>sch
sge is what help me carry and do a better healing and focus. whm i always choke when something goes wrong. ast is very hard but somehow i am relying on luck with cards to help me clear some stuff(its the only job i really use luck). didnt touch sch because of smn, i know the job is much harder than any other healing job
Since the launch of heavensward, if I am going to have a "bad" healer when I'm tanking it has been a AST healer. Its to the point if I'm not Lving a one of the other tanks I just play WAR. But when I get a great AST they are amazing an you really notice them :)
It’s extremely subjective. For me it goes in the order whm, ast, sch, sag in order from easiest to hardest.
I heal main Astro. It is definitely the busiest and most complicated of the healer jobs. The complexity makes daily queues less dull and buffing hypothetically makes them go quicker. Had to rethink my button layout several times to make it work though.
Another point when it comes to white mage is, it is the only healer in the game that you can start the game as - and if you're a fresh sprout new to Final Fantasy, White Mage might feel harder as, you're new to the game as a whole. However, will agree, easiest healer in my opinion as well.
AST main and I swear it's not necessarily that the job is harder, it's that so many things are just so pointlessly complex that i'm really glad they try fixing it for dawntrail:
-perfect card rotations to get a very negligable damage / heal boost
-RANDOM Arcana Card that either results in a GCD heal because you just couldn't get the heal over the damage card, or an overheal because you didn't need the heal and just couldn't get the damage over the heal card
-needs good knowledge of the game to perform perfectly (you need to know which job bursts at which timer to give them cards, although i reiterate that it's an act of perfection, the damage is very negligable unless you do very hard content or parse)
-the biggest pain: you need a 20 seconds pre-pull timer just to get your card rotation... TY YOSHI for fixing that for Dawntrail but oof, was it painful for EW...
Alina Linmew on Louisoix btw :D
Yeah now it's not 20 but 60, way better! :P
I do think they will change it soon so astral/umbral draw cant be used outside of combat but for now it's like that
Despite the jank of SCH, I sometimes find it the better healer than SGE. Besides the fact that SCH can stockpile way more healing resource than SGE (3 in gauge, Aetherflow ability, Dissipation, Recitation + Excog), its Sacred Soil is higher in potency (600 vs. 500 Kerachole) and doesn't conflict with Excog (Kerachole fights with Taurochole), Fey Blessing is weaker but can be used twice as often as Holos, faerie's auto healing is very good at not overhealing (whereas Kardia must be juggled between players to avoid overhealing), and I also find Consolation to better than Panhaima, although SGE does get Pneuma at 90 and SCH lacks any such equivalent (they then feel fairly equal at 90, but SGE feels... behind? at 80 sync.)
I didn't level Sage until recently because they were hard when the came reading was hard and those words were definitely words. It wasn't until recently I realized that I wasn't applying Kardia. I have since been having a lot of fun. It is definitely "Scholar, but you'll never get the supreme satisfaction of hitting a crit Adlo."
Okay so. I'm gonna throw in my healer expert 2 cents here.
What healer tends to be the easiest, depends on what you're used to, and a few other factors. White mage is considered the easiest, because it is just no-nonsense burst healing, but the people who find difficulty with it are usually ones who started as scholar mains, or a non-healer class.
Another factor is if you are used to healing/support in other games, White Mage is the easiest to click to because it literally is just a culmination of every other healer in any RPG you've probably played prior to FFXIV.
But the biggest factor is what I mentioned before, if you're used to shield healers (a predictive mitigation type), then you will struggle to adapt to regen healers (reactive burst types). You train yourself to mitigate before the damage happens, only to swap to healing after the fact, and you will have some trouble if it's not what you're used to.
That's not even to mention if you are a DPS main first and foremost, you aren't even trained to watch your party's health in the first place, and Tank is in a similar boat to an extent (since some tanks train themselves to be able to better protect others).
Absolutely bravo 100000%
I'm shield main lol.....and whm still at 81 and dropped ast when it has adjusted allot....
Very difficult to understand ....
Everything feels very difficult....😢...though I love whm....glamor and story....😢
And wow switching to smn
Making me feel not good dps 😢😢
Cause I'm always looking for who to raise instead of doing damage.....
Smn though soo much fun and I'm switching to pct and ohh boy where are my heals😂
Though have huge room for paying attention to the boss fights not worrying who needs a heal is nice ❤
I'm an AST main, I absolutely love it. I like juggling everything and it has a fun tool kit. I've had fc mates tell me that SCH has to memorize a fight/dungeon more than any other healer and I don't think they realize how much pre-planning needed or how many dungeons/trials I've memorized LOL If you don't you are TRULY just reacting and it makes it a lot harder
To those people I simply ask them to observe Earthly Star and the layered buffs of 2 cards + Lord + Divination for burst window. If that isn’t intensive planning, idk what is.
It's eather memories or ask someone to put a marker above their head......I just recently have switched to smn and leveling pct and wow my reactions to avoid boss aoe is amazing 😂....have played healers for 10 years 😆
Oh I mostly played sch and ast
As healers over time...had no idea others have it easier 😢
I played since start and hardest was always whm....just personally...
I get very anxious when things go sour.....shields always have give me room to decide what i can do next.....
im relatively new to Scholar personaly, but i think Scholar definetly needs a rework on several Aspects of the Job because of how clunky they feel like compared to the other Healers. For example:
- Energy Drain: is a 100 Potency Instand Cast that only does mild damage and gives you a very small self heal that might not be there in the first place for how little it is. its only used for the Opener or on heavy movement Phases to do damage, but i found that Aetherflow is far too valiuable, and usualy reserve it for Sacred Soil and Exco because they offer far more Valiue for your buck. Energy Drain is definetly a Spell that needs to be either really buffed damage wise, or completly reworked into another Spell because in my opinion its more Bait than anything.
- Ruin II: does over 2x more Damage than Energy Drain, but has the downside of being on the GCD where its pretty much pointless to use unless youre walking a lot and you know where you can do Damage, which in many Boss Phases, usualy Mechanics where you have to walk a lot come with Raidwide Damage being dealt to the Group, where you gotta keep an eye on Peoples HP, or in dungeon Pulls, where usualy Mobs are stacked, and since its only a Single Target Spell, Art of War II deals more Damage for over 2+ Targets, which makes Ruin II to such a nieche Spell, that i think i used ot almost never to be honest. Its like Black Licorice, you can eat it if youre hungry, but why should you? just get some Popcorn instead.
- Aetherpact: An entire Resource Bar that has the SOLE Purpose to put a strong single Target Hot on someone that you can Toggle on and off. this might be controvertial because its not directly a bad Spell, it has its good uses and can be really nice to throw on a Tank thats just getting Spanked concistantly by a group of Mobs or if theres consistant Burst happening onto a Target where you can let Eos do the healing and focus on the others, which is where my complaints are: some Spells in your Kit can Toggle Aetherpact off where you have to be careful that if you use Spells that toggle Aetherpact off, that you keep an eye on the Target where Eos was Hooked on. Same goes for going out of Reach where you dont wanna cast Aetherpact in Dungeon Scenarios or Fights where you walk quite a distance away from Eos if you Position Eos somewhere Manualy. In my opinion, i think it just lacks something. Job specific Resources have usualy more Utility where you have multible Options on how to Spend and or use that Resource on, and if they are tied to one Specific Spells, they usualy have a high inpact and Great Visuals to go along with. it can be strong when used right, but the usage and situations are a bit limited, where its not rare where you just sit on a Maxed out Eos gage, waiting to use Aetherpact for, but everyones topped off and you cant really find a perfect momend to use Aetherpact on, which can happen sadly, so it feels like its more of an Emergency thing if anything, which could be better, like have other Spells make usage of the Eos gage, or give Aetherpact a stronger secondary effect to use along when you use Seraph where it could be an AOE Heal for everyone around a few Yalms around the Target thats hooked on or Rework Energy Drain that it doesnt cost Aetherflow anymore, but can be a Dot that Eos cast where Eos would Drain the Energy out of the Target you casted it on, grants the Heal for the damanged amount to a nearby target, which would make the opener a bit weaker for Scholar, but youd have a different option to do damage with and you would have to worry much about it with a higher Single Target potency if used on Max gage.
TLDR: Scholar needs a bit of Love and definetly deserves it for how Unique and fun the Job is.
Only thing that's "difficult" or rather "tricky' about Sage is Eukrasia.
It's a weave, but it works counter to how everything else in the game has taught you to weave.
Until you get used to it, you'll often miss shielding your tank and inadvertently apply a DoT to an enemy.
As for AST, it's not really hard in and of itself. The hard part is learning to play it optimally i.e. efficiently getting 3 seals and distributing cards for maximum effect.
This is more or less mine as well. WHM's only difficulty is being a bit rigid and having SO LITTLE party mitigation (only Temperance), vs all the other healers having more (AST has 3x per 2 mins between Collective x2 and Neutral Sect, which turns it into a GCD barrier healer for 20 seconds). SGE seems hard, but is SCH if SCH's tools were more straightforward and is far more mobile. SCH is harder, but I feel like it is more powerful, but less mobile when avoiding Ruin 2. And AST is the hardest, as you say, combining the harder elements of all three, then adding Cards.
It will be interesting to see how this shifts in Dawntrail since SGE optimization MAY (we don't know the final ability potencies yet) have a second DoT to maintain as its "Miasma 2" and CD with effectively SB SCH's Shadow Flare (the 60 sec CD oGCD attack), while SCH continues to be weird, but Seraphism is the inverse of Neutral Sect and SCH's "new attack" could be described as "press Chain Strategem twice". WHM will probably remain the easiest and even gets a movement tool at level 40 and another mitigation for the party, bringing the number to TWO per 2 minutes, though it is tied to using Temperance. And while it is getting another attack spell, it is instant cast, uses the same button as PoM so will not contribute to button bloat, and tied to PoM so you can effectively just press THAT button 4 times along with Misery and Dia and Assize, and have a good burst window. AST looks to be less RNG, though the burst window will still have it ideally playing at least 2 Cards, and like SCH it has a follow-up to its raid buff, Divination. It looks to be powerful, like SCH for the barrier healers, but a bit less mental load from the Card game, while still having some.
I suspect WHM will remain the one considered the easiest, though I could see AST moving down (or up somehow), and SGE and SCH moving around. So those three could end up in any order. WHM is the only one I'm mostly sure will stay in the same place.
Addendum to the fun fact:
In Shadowbringers, Afflatus Misery was worth exactly 3 Glares and that was considered okay. This was because Glare used to have a full 2.5-second base cast time, so the DPS loss was considered worth it for movement. Conventional wisdom said you wanted to spend 1 lily or 3 so as to limit your DPS loss to 1 Glare at a time.
In Endwalker, Glare's cast time was reduced to 1.5 seconds at base along with the other healers, but there was no consideration for how that would affect the rest of the kit. Lilies were no longer needed for movement, plus they simply forgot to raise Afflatus Misery's potency relative to the new Glare III. This made lilies an even worse DPS loss before and led to the described problems before Afflatus Misery's potency was buffed. WHM players also became famously stingy with their lily heals in high end content, much to the annoyance of their cohealers.
I was whm for a long long time. I leveled other healing jobs lately. I love Sage. It's my main now. For some reason I can't be a good Scholar. I tried. Nope. I panic more and I'm less confident with this job than any other healer. Ast was fun at low levels but is just more complicated whm later for me.
I believe that the hardest job is the one you don't feel good with.
I feel like AST is the only one that actually has a somewhat higher learning curve due to needing to learn optimal timings for Earthly Star placement while managing cards on top of the usual cooldown planning every other healer is subject to.
The hardest part of AST is remembering to use your Minor Arcana card, because your heals and shields are so disgustingly good, you don't need it half the time. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Never considered how much of a pain the cards were for controller though. Sounds like a nightmare.
Eh, you can get used to it, but it's something you really have to think about when you're even placing things on your hotbar.
Cards on controller are actually easy, 2 cards are for melee and 2 are magical that was basically it
I feel like the controller comment is an excuse.
I can easily do triple card bursts with controller without drifting. It just takes practice like everything else.
I used to main astrologian when I played on pc, but when my pc broke and I had to switch to console I couldn't find a comfortable way to map the controller and had to switch to sage. I never did figure it out
I have a funny relationship with the healers. I started with White Mage, aye, and for a long time I couldn't understand why people played Scholar. Scholar was much harder, and had much less healing. So one day I got fed up with it and set myself a challenge. I am not allowed to use White Mage, only Scholar. If I'm only allowed to play Scholar, then I'll just have to git gud, right?
Well, this worked, and now I actually rather like Scholar. However I now have the opposite problem. I don't know how to play White Mage anymore.
And then there's Sage. I love Sage. You telling me, a Gundam fan, that I can play Scholar with *funnels*?! This class has become my new obsession in the past week or two. It took some time to learn, and I still am not anywhere close to optimal, but I'm learning! Dancer is my main, but I just can't put Sage down.
"I can just play Sage for this." "Eh, I don't need Dancer for this, I'll just play Sage." "Hmm. Maybe one more dungeon as Sage"
This is precisely the order I'd put them in. With the AST changes coming in DT I'm hoping it'll drop in difficulty significantly, as the card system is definitely The Hard Part - I find the actual healing with AST incredibly easy, but the cards are so annoying.
As a SCH main, I personally find SCH super easy, but I know my kit extremely well, and I'm very good at memorising fights to know which Aetherflow need to be used for healing and when, and which can be used for Energy Drain. A lot of SCHs are... less than mediocre. I cannot tell you how many times I've been in a duty and gone "Did I just hear Deployment" when _nobody_ had a shield, so I start paying attention and... yeah, they're just using Deployment Tactics on cooldown, regardless of whether or not their target has a shield to deploy. They never seem to use Emergency Tactics unless I specifically let them know that's a button they have (something I sometimes have to do in, say, Orbonne for the Thunder God heal check, or P11 for Harrowing Hell, when I'm not the one healing). Exclusively using Ruin II at level 90 because it's instant-cast. Stuff like that. All my friends who've tried SCH after playing SGE get extremely tripped up by the Aetherflow, not knowing how many to "save for healing" - which is what knowing entire fights is for. You save exactly as many as that fight needs, and only when you need to. Meanwhile I notice that even SGEs and WHMs who aren't necessarily That Good are still Fine. But maybe this is the same hyper-awareness effect that you noticed in that Mentor Roulette video when you went "Oh no, am I a healer main?" because that was the moment I realised "Oh no, am I a SCH main?" 😂
I did once meet a WHM who was standing off in Narnia during dungeon pulls casting Holy, and when I let them know that it was a point-blank AOE and they weren't hitting anything, they responded "You're not my dad". Not even "You don't pay my sub". Absolutely bizarre.
Gotta say, I as a new player find people saying SCH and AST hard kind of surprising.
Perhaps its because all the buttons have very specific ways to use them that it makes it easier for me to play them, vs WHM for instance in which every button pretty much just feels like "and this button also heals".
I actually have a harder time with whm ironically because I spend a lot of time "playing chicken" with tank health in ways I don't feel I need to with the others.
I've played all healers extensively in EW and I've been doing AST in ultimate now before it gets reworked, and I definitely think the order is something like:
1 - Astro
2 - Scholar
3 - lol
4 - White Mage
5 - Sage
Astrologian is really hard to wrap your head around, especially with all of the cards and the pre-planned healing you need, but it's an incredibly good time when you learn how to use lightspeed properly, and that sometimes it's just not worth it to redraw.
Scholar is my main and I think it's probably the easiest to fuck up, with a bunch of skills locking you out of other skills, skills meant to be used with one another, and very limited job resources. Not only that, but it's the only job left with actual pet management and you DO need to mess around with Eos a decent bit if you want to be optimal with it.
White Mage is comparatively extremely easy and straightforward, being the only healer that can on-demand heal while moving without having a gimped healing output. You get so many lilies that you can just Rapture whenever you need to move and then fit in the extra blood lily during 2 mins for a DPS increase.
The only reason Sage is easier than White Mage imo is because it's literally healer summoner. It's a Lego job. You have a Lego for every situation, and when they arrive you just push the Lego. You have so many Legos that you're probably not even taking any damage the entire savage fight and you'll still have mits left over, and you have so many movement tools that you literally don't even need to think about how you're going to pull the movement off in any specific mechanic.
AST definitely has a strong learning curve when you get into optimising it, but once you do it's genuinely such a fun healer and feels good to do the 2 minute rotation with up to 11 weaves depending on RNG.
DT rework is taking a lot of that away sadly =/
@@zaytex5000 Yeah, I'm really sad about it :(
I prefer shield healers myself, but when in a group with another shield healer (even the same), I usually opt to use shields less and the pure heals more. This allows me to avoid overwriting shields unless things go south.
This means with SCH, I use the pure heals of Lustrate, Whispering Dawn, Indomitability, Excogitation (deliberatly when it will heal instead of the countdown fail-safe), and Fey Blessing more frequently with the damage negations of Sacred Soil and Fey Illumination, while my partner healer makes use of their shields.
When playing as SGE, I try to stick to Physis, Druochole, Ixochole, and Taurochole, while keeping Kerachole up as much as possible. Makes it harder to keep Toxicons up, but it prevents shield replacing.
With regards to SCH itself, I absolutely miss when Energy Drain restores MP instead of HP. That was a boon lost on the SCH's MP management.
the first healer I started with was astro and my biggest issue was that I accidentally removed essential dignity from hotbar somehow 😂
(maybe because I was a curebot when I started 😅)
and damn i love the planning aspect of it! its not too hard to recover if something goes wrong since my LoC rng is heavenly
and personally it was easy for me to memorize the cards because I didn't know words "bole","spire" & "ewer" haha
on a side note though, I was running a dungeon and had an ast healer that was fishing for benefic buff (I personally never use benefic I because it doesn't feel worth it), is it worth trying to get the buff?
As of currently, both WHM and AST have the obsolete heal that gets replaced, benefic I is not worth using even for the buff, there's another video in this channel that has an explanation of this too if you're interested
I don’t enjoy SGE aesthetic enough to try it beyond leveling. Maximizing AST’s damage is hardest for me (controller player), but HP-wise SCH is hardest simply because I am not always great at anticipating which attacks shields are necessary for and which it would be better to DPS through since teammates will be fine.
As someone who plays ast and sch. The amount of mana consumption sch takes makes that job so much harder in my opinion. It can be rough some times. I rarely ever go out of mana on ast, but sch its pretty much every dungeon
As someone who's leveled Sage, Scholar, and Astrologian, in that order, to say I was surprised by their placements would be an understatement.
I struggled _a lot_ when playing Sage, but that might be because its really hard to recover when things are going bad, as some other comments also mentioned. Scholar by comparison is far more forgiving.
And with Astro, I had a _much_ easier time than either of the shield healers. The cards, which you named as the primary difficulty, can be done very quickly and easily if you know your party composition. To elaborate:
In normal party composition, you're slot 1, tank slot 2, then melee, caster, and ranged phys in that order iirc. With quick party targeting courtesy of the F keys, any melee cards can just go to F3 and ranged cards to F4. This expands a bit in 8man, moving melee cards to F5 and ranged cards somewhere after that, but the easy option of F8 always exists.
As for the symbols, theres very few cases where you actually need 3/3 to not wipe. 2/3 is plenty, meaning redrawing isnt necessary that often either... unless your party is all melee and you got a ranged card, of course.
My DPS monkey brain simply can not stand not having the damage buff from astrodyne
As someone who plays all healers since launch I would say it’s WHM SCH AST SGE.
AST is hard to learn but once mastered it’s easier to play that SGE
Astro was my first healer in any game and I only got into it for “the heart of the cards” 😂 it’s my favorite healer and easiest for me personally after trying them all.
I play white mage and sage in dungeon/criterion and astrologion and scholar in raids /trials. I wish they would let healers switch depending on the set up.
How i play healer seems mana efficient.
"If the party i doing the mechanics correctly, all they need is Regen"
So far, up to level 70 content, i havent needed anything else, and the tanks, to my knowledge, havent needed as much.
You've been getting Warriors then, waiting for the "nah different tanks" all I see in duties is Warrior now, but even still MP magaement isn't be an issue until players start dying.
@@ishirutaekakura308 its not just warriors, paladin, and dark knight. havent gotten a gun breaker yet. i make sure to have regen up, the reason i think things are going well all the time is the allegan armor is just way too good outside raids.
@@TheKillerman3333GNB feels a bit squishy to heal until the get heart of corundum. Then they basically just excog themselves every 25 seconds so you can play more hands off of them.
Really interesting results. As a sprout who mains tank, I was using a scholar on the side (the 2in1 dps/heal concept was nice). Thought I'd look at sage, and even after watching a few guides, I just found it soooo overwhelming. I've admittedly not really played much of sage as I can't wrap my head around it, but from a strictly newbie point of view, scholar seems far easier at the 70 range because each move seems to be pretty clear on when to use it (aka 1 button for big heal with aether flow, one button for shielding 1 person, 1 button for shielding group etc.) where as sage reads as having many buttons for essentially the same thing so I just dk when to use anything and in what siutation. I dunno. Even after practicing, Sage feels like word salad, while scholar seems to have super clear abilities.
I do really wanna try astrologian, will be interesting to see if that one clicks better for me than sage, lol.
What helped me lot when I was learning Sage (as a scholar main), was mapping out my hotbar by comparing spells/abilities. Because both healers are the shielding type, there is predictably going to be similarities in the tooling, this also forces you to really read up on the tooltips and overall sped up learning sage for me. This mapping exercise also helps me organize AST/WHM and allows me to maintain some level of muscle memory around consistent tools like surecast, swiftcast, rez spells, lucid dreaming etc. I think if you have a good understanding of how shields work in the game, Sage should be a fairly easy to pick up.
@@Kuroi295 I think, for me, it's just that all the buttons sound like they do essentially the same thing. It's not the hotbars or prompts I'm struggling with, its what to use in what situation. And even after watching like 3 different guides, I still just don't understand it in the same way that I do most the other classes.
I think the trouble with most guides is they explain what moves do, but don't really explain how to properly utilisse the. WeskAlbers one of my faves as he actually shows rotations and explains why things are used in what order, but that happens less with healers because healers are more reactive.
I dunno, i'll maybe try again at some point but it might just be a class that aint for m,e.
I learned to heal as an AST, it was the first healer I really wanted to try and its now my main healer, I couldn't mesh with SCH... maybe I will try it again in DT...
its not super relevant, but im a scholar main still early game (going through msq) im level 70, just got to ishgard. since literally like level 50something, i felt like every new skill i got required aetherflow because the job quests for your other skills are locked behind msq. just funny how for about 20 levels nothing changed but what to spend aetherflow on
After leveling all 4 healers to 90 and being pretty much a healer main Though no savage content. Just not enough of the first criterion.
My main is White Mage. I like how the job plays overall. Agree on what makes it hard and how it's by far the worst job at 50 or below.
My second focus is Sage. I still struggle knowing what cooldowns to use when. I'm not perfect on WHM, but messing up there just means less DPS. Messing up cooldowns as Sage means not enough healing.
Haven't done enough Scholar. Leveling was pretty straightforward and easy even. To a point I don't know how to play it well enough.
Astrologian is fun. Applying cards demands your constant attention and the healing kit needs some practice and planning to use well.
Yeah, that's about the ranking I expected. Astrologian is the only healer that has a real, honest-to-goodness high APM burst phase, and that burst phase involves reacting to random cards and matching them to the damage profile of whatever jobs you happen to be playing with. It's a thing no one else in the game has to do. The balance spread era was actually easier to play, which feels weird in hindsight.
There are at least some complexities to the other jobs, for all that the community loves to kvetch about how easy healing is
- Maintaining uptime during movement is an issue on all the healers, more than it is on even Black Mage nowadays. Healers have few instants, and they're often competing for other uses than movement (e.g. Swiftcast for Raise). Sage and White Mage are I think the most constrained, but an Astrologian isn't going to have a great time if they feel they have to lock Lightspeed to burst either.
This is felt quite differently by different people. If the idea of substituting in a little extra Ruin 2 or Aspected Benefic doesn't fill you with loathing and you always E. Prog. on every raidwide then moving will be less of a problem. Optimizing involves a lot of tricky work minimizing the distance moved during mechanics and slidecasting through a lot of fire, which can be difficult.
- Using the Afflatus spells well is something people find very counter-intuitive. It's the only ability in the game where I've explained how to use it -- specifically that using lilies on pure overhealing during movement or downtime is a gain and why -- and on multiple occasions had people respond with some variant of "that can't possibly be true and I refuse to do that".
- Barrier healers have additional responsibilities in higher end content that pure healers generally don't. If some people were killed from full health and you're an Astrologian then that's probably not your problem. If you're a Scholar then it is specifically your problem, and it's your job to figure out how to make them survive the next time.
Part of playing well on SGE and SCH involves managing the overall group mitigation, both to keep people alive and so you can avoid spending GCDs on shields that weren't necessary. Doing this well requires carefully planning all of your own non-GCD mitigation and shield abilities, but also knowing the mitigation available to other jobs and coordinating their use with the group.
I mean, you still have Collective unconscious on AST for mitigation help as well and neutral sect if shits really hitting the fan and need a stronger regen and a decently strong shield. Collective always worked well for me when I raided with a sch cohealer at least.
WHM is easily the hardest healer to use in ARR (less so but still true in HW) when synced that low because it has the weakest kit compared to the other healers. For leveling dungeons, Dzemael and Aurum Vale are especially noticeable because Aspected Helios is a lvl 42 unlock and costs less mp and is supported by cards for mp recovery, but Medica II is a lvl 50 unlock and only gets Lucid Dreaming alone while costing more mp. All healers at lvl 50 also have decent ogcd options while WHM's first ogcd is.... Benediction, which you'd struggle to use more than 3-4 times per dungeon.
i have all healers at 90, casual player, and to me whitemage feels the hardest when the group doesnt know what theyre doing. i feel way more comfortable to re-stable the group with astro and scholar, and some extent sage, tho to me AST and SCH are the most comfortable, while i acknowledge WHM and SAG are easier to pick up
edit: i miss noct ast
sage is kinda hard for me, in that I keep failing to proc addersting. I'm thinking it's my button placement or I just don't know when to time my shields so they can be broken
Astrologian feels busy during the entire fight process and that’s why I love it compared to the other healers. Excited for the rework for DawnTrail!
Hhehehehehehe
I play the hardest healer
Astrologian for life.
If you can manage your cards properly, you will never worry about MP consumption.
lucid dreaming? never heard of that
@@blanco1co1t I barely use lucid dreaming, lol
I play my cards as soon as they are ready
As long as you keep your regen up, you’ll barely have to use any heals because healers in EW are too broken lmfao
That’s why were deemed useless
Astrologian isn't hard lol, it has rng that doesn't make it hard though, it's just flawed
astro main. for me sage and scholar are hardest, with probably sage being the worst for me. some of it is understanding the names (i get it's the theme but come on square), a lot of it is MP management. my most hellish dungeon was ketosis with a dark knight who i'm convinced had deleted all their mit buttons from their hotbar.
As a controller player, I don't mind astro. It's busy yes, but it's more than manageable.
as someone who has all 4 healers at 90 but mostly plays scholar and astrologian(favoring ast between the two as well), I don't think my opinion on the difficulty of astrologian should count 😅 otherwise I'd be inclined to say it's one of the easier ones. The hardest to learn for me out of the four was sage however because of reasons said in the video (all the buttons are blue, Greek names) but also because the shields are more fragile than sch and the direct healing is weaker than ast/whm it is a balancing act at first before you get the hang of it
Interesting placement of SGE. Playing AST most of the time (probably not optimally at all) I just don't get the job. My monkey-brain can't seem to figure out what the tooltip is actually saying. Way too many interactions with other buffs and spells. Setup my action bars, read the tooltip, cried in monkey, read them again, cried some more and switched back to my AST and am so looking forward to the DT changes
It's me, I'm the hardest healer when my adlo crits and the shield goes beyond the hp bar
I'd swap sage and astro around I just can't get on with shield healers
Interesting that these videos could easily be a "Best Designed Jobs, Best to Worst" since the harder jobs are almost always harder due to being poorly designed or outdated
Ast is much well rounded before they introduce seage, it can be a barrier heal or regen
Me preferring AST over WHM bc WHM feels too simple...
From strictly the endgame standpoint of a veteran omnihealer:
SCH is the hardest to do optimal damage with since you need to balance using aetherflow only on E. Drain while keeping the group alive with just faerie heals and recitation. SCH has by far the worst healing toolkit if you don’t want to lose damage.
AST is the hardest to actually heal with. Lady of the Crowns being RNG (until dawntrail, praise Yoshi-P) and every good healing tool being HOTs or requiring setup makes it awkward to… actually heal. Especially during 2-min burst.
Yeah Astro: super duper awesome and fun to play, but u also have to frantically fiddle with random cards.
The randomness of AST card effect both heal and damage, since the card buff and combo can fail (even after they buff the chance), and minor arcana got 50/50 to get what u want. When you redraw an ABA (which is bad, 50% chance in the first place) and got ABB (worse, in another 50% chance)... That ruines lots things. Only 1/4 chance to be optimize... is not quite friendly.
in my opinion it really truly depends on the instance. on the surface, whm and sge are easier to learn but in terms of recovery astro and sch are better imo, and some fights definitely favor one healer over the other. stuff like DSR being doable on sage but a lot easier to prog on scholar, zeromus struggling hard with scholar esp if your coheal is asleep at the wheel, whm really good in uwu but really BAD in ucob. it really depends on what you're talking about
mastering? honestly, scholar is harder than astro imo. a lot of astro is muscle memory/card recognition which you can slowly get better at bc the only thing that truly suffers when you're learning it is your own dps/optimization. scholar tho has things like fairy positioning, not being able to spam heals the second you need them like you can on sage bc of pet ticks, not being able to control WHO gets healed by your drip healing (kardia vs embrace) if you aren't doing weird things with the fairy's range which requires ground clicking, and ofc it actually does have more buttons than astro and yes you do need all of them, including physic....
sage is a lot better at recovery of HP over sch, but sch can brute force many things that sage just physically cannot do. their base shields are not comparable sadly and i say this as a sage main haha, i'm just way more comfortable greeding on sage so i prefer it in environments where i am expected to output my share of damage while mitigating
I’m a tank main, but when I heal, I prefer to play astrologian. I love the difficulty
I’ve only had experience with level 50 content and below with sage, and even at those levels you gotta know each boss fight and well, managing tank pulls that are honestly intended for not a barrier healer (for the love of all that is holy don’t pull the entire dungeon I can’t help and my entire mana pool is munched like a meal with preventing that heath from disappearing in a whole second)
Shield healers do just fine, its just about using your mitigations as mitigations and not just heals. sub 50 sage only has a regen and shields, 50 does get the bubble which should be used basically after the first tick of damage for most effectiveness. sage draws alot of power from being able to, especially at lower levels just be able to dps, while healing safely with even at 50 phlegma, kardia, druochole, soteria.
also with sub 50 content specifically im sure a good chunk of the issue is actually new tanks still learning to mit themselves.
@@bradypinnell7782 I know all that, but sometimes tanks really do pull to hard and I have to dump healing on them before I can hit the bubble when the damage isn’t basically bringing their health down to 1\5 health before I can do either of the diagnosis casts. And tanks fully expecting sage to be like white mage with fat healing.
It’s actually boss fights though where I fail because I’ll start spacing out with the tank not dying as fast and all I have to do is laser the boss lol
@@Zamerus well, I'm speaking as someone who has leveled every class, multiple times, since before arr even. in end walker especially, every single healer can wall to wall pull on every single dungeon, if geared with even just poetics and random dungeon drops. with the exeptions of sometimes holminsters first pull and mt gulgs last pull.
@@bradypinnell7782 I feel like your misreading me, I'm complaining because I don't like having to focus on only healing during group pulls, which is exactly what wall to walls force me to do, NOT that I can't actually do it
@@Zamerus You initially stated that shield healers were not intended to handle big pulls, and that your mana was an issue, the first part of that very much implies you cannot do it, i wasn't misreading. however most of my points also address simply not wanting to exclusively heal. when i said every healer can handle 99.9% of wall to wall pulls, i mean comfortably, with room to dps plenty, especially with sage as they heal BY dpsing. with the few exceptions i mentioned and i did forget the first endwalker dungeons last mob pull.
it is very possible that tanks are mitigating enough, but not every pull and that is also not a point against the healers themselves
To me, Sch is probably the hardest because it lvls with smn. So going from the baby’s first caster and trying to make sense of sch, when it’s already maxed at 90, is a lot. I eventually made an alt to play/lvl sch from the start and still don’t really know what I’m doing compared to the other healing jobs. As nice as it is for one job share the exp for a completion it’s fine but not conducive to learning.
I think more of the issue there is ignoring sch for 60 levels, most people who had interest in both and enjoyed playing both, did just that. that's not really a flaw with the class itself, and as you said if you didn't wanna do what most people would suggest, which is just alternate between them AS you level, then you have the option to either make a new character or just run the dungeons without getting the exp in order. might even be a better experience since you then wouldn't HAVE to run a dungeon multiple times for exp.
@@bradypinnell7782 that’d be ideal but as I’m seeing the sprout experience, as in the sprouts in my fc basically having 1-2 jobs at high lvls while having everything else locked, it’s pretty typical for new people to get comfortable with a couple of jobs and sticking to them.
Hell, I think I played smn till 90 and had people telling me I’m losing out on exp if I don’t change it up.
I have every healer to 90 except Astro(67)and I’m struggling with it. It just feels so weak. I know I’m not max level yet so it will probably get better, but it’s the first time I’ve had that “fk it, I’m done” feeling.
Their personal dps will always feel weak. Healing wise though it gets a lot easier when you get earthly star, celestial intersection etc. You have 3 strong heals on minute CDs by level 70 in C.opp Collective and star. Use them on the tank in casual content since you'll have them back before you know it.
@@matrinezkevin11492awesome, ty for the tip!
According to many players I've asked this question to, the answer is Paladin.
I'll be honest I always thought of Scholar and Astro as the easiest 0_0
White mage just seems suuuper intimidating with such a big focus on just healing
At this point WHM is just 3 parts caster 1 part healer - and I'm not even joking. A WHM that has good damage output can rival an average SMN or RDM player with how much damage they can dish out.
Also a thing that I often rely on with Astrologian is card play macros. I just need to know who are my party members and what position they are on the party list to throw a card at them. The macro bypasses a lot of the mouse movement required to play a card on someone in the party
As an astro main I agree with these!
Astro is by far the hardest in raids or extremes especially if new to the content. This is because you have to time a couple of your abilities to get the most value. It is also the busiest of the healers.
I play a lot of SCH and maybe I’m just bad but there is no longer really any “pet management”
White mage is easy because you have to many buttons to heal
Astro is in the same boat due to its who gimmick is prep time
Scholar is a bit harder than Astro as prep and planning are required for every engagement
Sage suffers from two things MP consumption and the least amount of methods of healing
I find sage easier than whitemage for all the cons of white mage you pointed out.
You seem to not realize, holy is a damage mitigation
You can easily: holy, medica 2/Regen", holy.
One thing I'll say about White Mage healing that isn't being mentioned when it comes to leveling is that Regen is extremely good for those levels before you get Holy, and Holy carries entire dungeons once you get it.
The one problem Regen had was it pulling aggro when the tank was gathering mobs, but the devs removed that interaction for Regen, faeries, and Kardia. A White Mage can heal an entire dungeon with just Regen and Cure II easily if they don't care about being perfect with damage output; a Regen spotted onto a DPS when it drops to 2/3rd HP is enough to prop it back up to full health over time. These two spells are efficient enough that you can maintain using them plus Stone/Glare spam as needed with your Lucid Dreaming.
It only gets easier once you have Medica II, which (as its reputation is deserved) is extremely strong group healing. It's strong enough that stacking a Medica II and a Regen on a tank before they wall-to-wall can compensate for a huge amount of the damage your tank would suffer on-the-go. I suppose what makes the job have the reputation of being so ridiculously easy is that all the other healing jobs can't really get away with this simplicity. A White Mage can just use Regen and Cure II and do its core job from level 1-90. Anything from there is 'extra'.
Admittedly you *should* try to DPS as much as you can, and *should* use other healing/shield options that are more efficient, but you don't *have* to.
I'll throw my 2 cents in for each job as I watch the video.
I would argue that Sage and Scholar need to be swapped due to the nature of Kardion. Proper use of Kardia requires dancing the buff around with weaving to move the healing, which is something a faerie does automatically without input. The faerie also performs its healing automatically without requiring input; if there's somebody in range to heal, it heals. It's such a no-fuss system.
A Sage has a strange healing system compared to the others. Ideally you want to perform all your healing with OGCDs and Kardia, meaning you want to be highly aware of your cooldowns and how to efficiently space them. This is due to the nature of Kardia vs the faerie; a faerie will keep healing while you heal, but Kardia stops providing its bonus healing if you stop and perform healing/shielding. Due to this, you are punished a lot more for having to hard-cast healing at any point as a Sage.
This is somewhat complicated by addersgall. It incentivizes you to use your shields and charge it, but putting up your shields at any point except before pulls or during fight downtime is a loss. This means that a Sage has to learn when dropping a Eukrasian shield is a net gain.
Scholar also has the advantage of Art of War being so damned good for pulls that they don't have to do anything else. Use Sacred Soil, weave Lustrate as needed, be near the tank, and slam Art of War on the enemies, and they can perform almost the entire game's content. Swap Art of War for Biolysis/Broil on single targets and you're fine. People like to huff and say that it's a choice between Lustrate and Energy Drain, but they're being ignorant or dishonest a lot of the time; usually you're using your charges on Sacred Soil and spotting heals with Lustrate, because if you don't spot heals with Lustrate you have to perform the odd hard-cast heal, and (since Energy Drain is only 100 potency) that's a net loss. It's only a 'thing' when you have a co-healer.
Sage, on the other hand, has an array of things to do during the pull. They can't rely on just Sacred Soil, their faerie, and one weaved heal in Lustrate to handle it all. They have to think like a reverse tank and stagger their cooldowns, all while tracking a larger array of AoE damage spells.
One thing you also didn't touch on was how Sacred Soil is a lot more powerful that Kerachole due to the hidden mechanic of buff application. Sacred Soil actually applies a secret instant tick for 100 potency, meaning its healing is 100 potency higher, and the damage reduction lingers for 2-3 extra seconds after the area fades, meaning its mitigation lasts longer. This might not sound like much, but with how powerful Kerachole and Sacred Soil are before taking this into consideration, it bumps Sacred Soil up to ludicrous levels.
Astrologian is an odd healer in the sense that if you only do what a White Mage does (Aspected Benefic, Benefic II, Aspected Helios) you can mimic what makes a White Mage simple, and complicate it in steps to get comfortable with it. Once you take into account Essential Dignity, I would argue that Astrologian is one of the easiest healers to play at skill floor.
Where Astrologian gets difficult is when you do anything more than that, and it suffers from severe button bloat. I believe one of the most difficult aspects of the class is finding enough comfortable key bindings to not click your abilities. It's simply that engorged with things to do.
In practice, however, if you just dole out your cards with a priority system, use Essential Dignity, and heal like a White Mage, you'll do fine. Smatter in the other spells and weaves slowly as you get comfortable and it becomes second nature.
It is definitely the hardest healer if you try to reach the skill ceiling, absolutely, but if you're not doing things like, say, monitoring the Dark Knight's burst phase to card them, or using some sort of abacus to monitor your party's DPS to determine the best Samurai to put physical cards on, then Sage honestly can compete in difficulty. A lot of the late-game healing just becomes "Place star, throw blue cards on melee and purples on casters, be a White Mage with Essential Dignity". I would argue that ED is so damned good that it is worth the card business just to have it in your kit. Anything else you do feels 'extra'.
One hard thing about White Mage MP management is that Thin Air, as powerful as it is, doesn't do much except MP management. Other healers have their MP management baked into their kit, while WHM only has Assize to regen MP while doing something else. You need to go out of your way to regen MP.
It's also lillies and how you're not spending mana. But yes, it's decreasing mana spent instead of recovering mana.
I honestly can't see whm being easier than sage (but maybe i'm biased and haven't played whm enough), and yes i started with sage as my first healer and for the first few runs it quite rough to get used to having quite a few buttons and "everything looks the same color/design" but it clicked for me quite quickly because how with sage you can quite literally turn your brain off and get away with nearly every combination of buttons in any order you can think of.
When comes to whm, though it's easy like sage, to me it's noticeably harder than sage.
Many of the whm spells are super mana hungry, mana management is significantly harder as you have more buttons to press, whm is much less mobile than sage at almost any level range, and i like i said before, sage can get away with mostly any combination/order of spells while whm (and even more true for sch and ast) cannot.
As someone who only does Tank and DPS, here's the list based on what I've run into:
1. Easiest: Scholar
2. White Mage
3. Astrologian
4. Hardest: Sage
Sage is mainly the pre-planning required to prevent future hits. Ast isn't too complex until you do the cards, and it appears that is easier in Dawntrail. White Mage is the standard. Scholar is a little easier with your fairy heals (but Scholars in Dawntrail have been way worse overall, focusing too hard on damage).
Kinda crazy that people consider sage easier to play than Scholar. Scholar fairies literally heal constantly and will be able to pick their targets based on priority. Sage gets ONE target for their bonus heal, and they need to use a skill to swap it. They also lack the sheer healing potential of a Scholar, given that Scholar can stick regens / AoE heals and combine them with guaranteed crits and emergency tactics for swapping shields with heals - which is seriously NEEDED in some content where you need to top a character off to remove doom.
I'd argue Sage is probably the hardest to use effectively while WHM and AST are the easiest. In my humble opinion.
I personally do not like energy drain. At all. I dont like trading healing for barely a worthwhile amount of damage and unless I have aetherflow again, I'm always saving them for healing.
I must be doing something wrong with Sage, because in dungeon pulls I feel like no matter what I do the tank always drops low, and then I've spent all my cooldowns so if anything actually goes _wrong_ I have to spam GCD healing and it takes a while to stabilize again. On the flipside, I play both Scholar and Astrologian, and with both of them I rarely struggle to keep up with tanks unless I'm making mistakes. I've only gotten Sage to level 76, but do higher levels make that much of a difference?
might seem like its a dig, but i dont mean it that way, are you using kardia? and by that i dont mean just applying it, you know abcs. always be casting, with that they effectively have permanent free regen that you can buff every like 60 secs. I love shield healers and dont play sage because its too little to think about for me, especially in dungeons. but besides abcs, using most of your ogcds as mits rather than heals helps alot, especially when combined with your shields, i bubble off cd, and youre generally free to do more damage than the other healers since you're mostly ogcds and mits and kardia, which should result in things dying faster and more cds being available all around.
also generally speaking the healing front across the board gets easier in dungeons the later you get as tanks are nigh unkillable and most dps have 1 or 2 heals even, while you're also gaining more tools
@@bradypinnell7782 Fair question, but the issue isn't kardia because I'm pretty good at staying on top of enemies with attacks. Maybe I'm using mits in the wrong combinations? I try using things like kerachole + soterion, but it never seems like enough and I have to use more. Or am I supposed to always maintain 3+ mits/buffs on the tank for the whole pull?
@@javi7636 personally, as a shield healer myself, i try not to stack % mits if i can help it, the tank is likely already mitting a bit and there is diminishing returns, instead i couple it with shields, say someone has 20% mit up and you shield for 100 pot, its then effectively worth 120 pot, where as stacking mits actually hurts the pot of the mit.
it will also help to keep an eye on your tanks buffs, getting familiar with their big cds can let you know when to not stack your own big cds on and instead shield till their own mit wears off, then apply your own
@@javi7636 generally speaking for dungeons, flat healings value does not change based on your mits, so while i have a mit up, i will lean more towards shielding than healing, when i have no mits available, that is when i would use things like pneuma.
i will always kerachole instead of ixochole, if i have the choice as the regen will be more healing, and it includes a mit.
stuff like pepsis can also be used if a shield is about to expire, but still has some value left on it.
you can rotate between haima and panhaima, even on mob pulls where the dps shouldnt be getting it.
its similar to tank in that you really dont need to save all your cooldowns till the boss, much better to find a pattern so they come off cd around when youd need them in the boss, rather than not using them
@@bradypinnell7782 I'm still leveling so I don't have panhaima, pneuma, or enhanced kerachole (and other things when synced down for roulettes). But I noticed that haima is super strong, so I definitely need to use that more consistently. It's also possible that I'm waiting too long before applying mits. I'll experiment more when I get back home.
WHM was by far the easiest. I could do major DPS with minimal effort and the heals felt super potent, and I hardly ever needed to hardcast. AST had potent heals but DPS felt challenging, and SCH felt like a lot of work for less potent offense and defense.