So I brought this up in another thread, but I believe it's worth its own thread.
The fact that SCH can self SC reliably and out of harm's way in rapid succession is, for the lack of a better word, stupid. No job can match this efficiency, seeing how SCH's SC's can't really miss. The closest thing is RNG or an astoundingly well geared SAM using Yoichi (which would suffer from huge accuracy problems). Even then, they can't compare in consistency.
The first proposition I made is most likely to be the less popular one, but I modified it even more. Any Skillchain that uses an Immanence inflicted "weapon skill" suffers from a magic burst damage penalty. 25% for each use of an Immanence induced WS. That means if a SCH self SC's, the burst damage is reduced by 50%. I think this is fair because this strategy would still be potentially viable, but lose its practicality. This also endorses the "safer, but slower" aspect of the strategy.
The second proposition is to adjust the amount of damage a magic burst can do proportionate to what the skillchain did. For example, let's say a SCH lands distortion for 1,000 points of damage. Let's say a nuke can do at most 500% of what the Skillchain did. This is barring any resists or magic evasion. This way the mages can only get off small amounts of damage from Magic Bursts from a SCH Skillchain, but could potentially get even better burst damage than they're getting right now from doing a magic burst from a skillchain created by a DRG and DRK. This would also encourage players to make more multi step skillchains.
Each tier spell would need to have it's own formula and such to prevent ridiculous things like a 99k burst from stone. I won't bother making any, as there is pretty much zero chance the dev team would adopt those exact values if they chose to make this change. What's important from proposition 2 is that the actual damage from the skillchain becomes relevant again. Using SCH's for SC's would no longer be ideal, but would still be viable.
As stated in the post where this began, a safe strategy should not be an ideal strategy. I'm also fully prepared for people to hate me for this.