[Job Adjustmentｓ Manifesto] RDM

[SpankWustler]

It's important to remember that applying one or more stratagems significantly slows down the coming spell. While not relevant for a planned AoE sleep/gravity or an Ebullience-ificated nuke, but it's a very important thing to consider when looking at most of what Scholar casts in Light Arts or an emergency crowd-control spell.

Switching Arts and using the corresponding Addendum isn't an instant affair, either. It's just one or two extra seconds and one Strategem charge, but that can be an eternity or one charge too many in some situations.

Also, saying a job is second in curing to White Mage is like saying Mars is the second most livable planet in our solar system. The statement is true, but good luck building a mountain retreat on Olympus Mons. Scholar and Red Mage are on pretty even keel as far as healing goes, with Scholar's only palpable advantage being native status cures rather than status cures from a support job. If that's even an advantage.

[Economizer]

I regularly sub Scholar, so I'm aware of the timing that is involved with Arts/Strats. It punishes you if you aren't aware of what's going on in a fight, and destroys you if you get caught with the wrong arts out if you get hit with Amnesia. But I think the timing is manageable even if you want to throw down a nuke while main curing (Impact under Dark Arts on a White Mage? lololol). That said, I'd rather have a Red Mage on Stun duty then any other job, reflexes are certainly part of the job's strengths.

Scholar and Red Mage are on pretty even keel as far as healing goes, with Scholar's only palpable advantage being native status cures rather than status cures from a support job. If that's even an advantage.

Penury, Celerity, Accession, Rapture. Mainly Rapture, 50-60% more potency every minute or so (assuming your not burning strats on other stuff)? B+ Healing Magic, more of a factor if SE actually makes Healing Magic useful. If you sub Red Mage you can also Phalanx your party without a single merit.

A better argument would have been to argue that Blue Mage is a better healer then Scholar, but even then they'll be subbing Scholar for peak efficiency, if they a dedicated healer.

[Raksha]

Penury, Celerity, Accession, Rapture. Mainly Rapture, 50-60% more potency every minute or so (assuming your not burning strats on other stuff)? B+ Healing Magic, more of a factor if SE actually makes Healing Magic useful. If you sub Red Mage you can also Phalanx your party without a single merit.

Do you use Divine seal every 10 minutes? If so, do you use it for cures or for status effects?

Using stratagems for rapture isn't the best way to main heal. If you're spam healing a single tank chances are your stratagems aren't going to last long enough. If you are healing an entire party with accession, you're going to run out of mp (or if you stack penury you'll run out of charges). Dark Arts stratagems are generally a lot more useful than light arts strats. Light arts strats are nice, but they aren't game-breaking.

[Economizer]

Do you use Divine seal every 10 minutes? If so, do you use it for cures or for status effects?

Honestly, since Divine Seal is on a ten minute timer, I avoid using it outside of Campaign Battle Accession cures. Actually, this statement isn't exactly true, since I use Devotion as often as possible. Divine Seal isn't exactly something reliable to depend on.

Using stratagems for rapture isn't the best way to main heal. If you're spam healing a single tank chances are your stratagems aren't going to last long enough. If you are healing an entire party with accession, you're going to run out of mp (or if you stack penury you'll run out of charges). Dark Arts stratagems are generally a lot more useful than light arts strats. Light arts strats are nice, but they aren't game-breaking.

They certainly aren't game breaking, and they aren't something you should be relying on all the time, but they do give Scholar the edge over other non-WHM healers. I'm not trying to say otherwise.

I definitely notice that when Black Mages talk about Scholars, they definitely mention stratagems often, notably the ones you can't just sub for. I don't hear the discussion about Light Arts strats as often. Perhaps this is due to the nature of the way the player base sometimes utilizes nukes, as some players heavily rely on spike damage tier V spells over all else, whereas healers often are expected to constantly spam heals.

In my opinion, constantly having to spam heals often comes down from poor damage mitigation, non-tank jobs taking hate, and other factors that usually indicate a poor group makeup that the devs didn't necessarily design healing jobs around (opinions are subject to change with more information, and are not valid in the state of Maryland). But much of the healing in this game these days seems to spamming heals, which certainly favors a play-style that can't rely occasional on job ability boosts.

Again, perhaps there are issues with stuff like not giving certain jobs certain spells or abilities, but balance is a hard job, especially when dealing with balancing multiple classes performing multiple roles vs. so called specialist classes. Further, how much of this is Abyssea rewarding those specialists and how much of this is actual game issues?

Last, as a few questions, how satisfied are you with Scholar in relation to Black Mage? To Red Mage? And to Red Mages, how satisfied are you in relation to these two classes? If Scholars are happy with their position compared to Black Mage, what lessons about balance can we learn from that? And if they aren't, what would make them happy? And so on, with other classes?

[Raksha]

Last, as a few questions, how satisfied are you with Scholar in relation to Black Mage? To Red Mage? And to Red Mages, how satisfied are you in relation to these two classes? If Scholars are happy with their position compared to Black Mage, what lessons about balance can we learn from that? And if they aren't, what would make them happy? And so on, with other classes?

I'm quite satisfied with Dart Arts as it is. Being able to sub convert has opened it up dramatically. They only downside is lack of procs, but that is to be expected. I can't say that I've ever compared SCH to RDM, because all of the RDMs in my LS rarely nuke or heal, they are usually crowd control/buffers. I much prefer letting RDM fill that role since AoE'ing sleeps/break can tax your stratagems pretty heavily.

[Ketaru]

Last, as a few questions, how satisfied are you with Scholar in relation to Black Mage? To Red Mage? And to Red Mages, how satisfied are you in relation to these two classes? If Scholars are happy with their position compared to Black Mage, what lessons about balance can we learn from that? And if they aren't, what would make them happy? And so on, with other classes?

I know I'm somewhat ignoring your real question, but as somebody who has both RDM and SCH leveled as main jobs, I really grow tired of the use and abuse of SCH as a scapegoat for what backline RDM should be on this forum. It's as if people look at a Cliff Notes description of SCH, see that it casts both White and Black magic, and immediately assume the jobs are the same (I anticipate a certain poster is going to bring up "that whole swords thing" to differentiate the two jobs, to which I'll say sure, go ahead and include it if you are serious enough to gear for it).

It's just more "Dey tewk our jerbs" hysteria that BLMs, then WHMs, were showing ever since SCH was introduced. RDM is just the latest to hop on board the wagon.

Anybody else that actually plays the two jobs know that they play fundamentally different, even as they sub each other. SCH is being pushed towards its own brand of support further away from the other mage jobs: weather, -helix, enmity manipulation and measuring, Regain. Unfortunately, as things are now, they are not support spells that are seen as of value by the playerbase. Mostly because a job that is designed to supplement the other mages really has no business in a game that has moved from Alliance fights to one of how to take as few people as possible

[Greatguardian]

Personally I don't see Scholar as any form of "threat" to the other pure mage classes. SpankWustler hit the nail on the head with a lot of Scholar's major issues. Subbing SCH on a pure mage class is fundamentally different from Scholar Main. Red Mage on its own has a significantly broader spell selection available to them without having to resort to White/Black Addenda.

Scholar can't cast Sleep II without Add:Black until the 95 cap increase (unless /BLM). Scholar can't cast any of their T4 OR T5 nukes without Add:Black. Scholar can't cast any -Na spells without Add:White. All of the Reraises and Raise II are both locked into Add: White as well. Scholar also has D-rated skill across the board unless they're under the effect of a corresponding Arts. Red Mage caps are simply boosted by Arts, they don't rely on them.

Red Mage can nuke in Light Arts and Cure in Dark Arts if they have to while just sacrificing a bit of MP. Scholar can't even nuke in Light Arts at all. You really have to play Scholar, or see Scholar played actively, to understand how very real and very limiting those stances are to the class.

[cidbahamut]

Ketaru and GG have laid it out more eloquently than I could, but the long and short of it is that Scholar and Red Mage do not offer the same utility and are not interchangeable. I don't feel Scholar is stepping on Red Mage's toes or vice versa.

[SpankWustler]

I definitely notice that when Black Mages talk about Scholars, they definitely mention stratagems often, notably the ones you can't just sub for. I don't hear the discussion about Light Arts strats as often. Perhaps this is due to the nature of the way the player base sometimes utilizes nukes, as some players heavily rely on spike damage tier V spells over all else, whereas healers often are expected to constantly spam heals.

Giving up a second or so to gain more power or efficiency is definitely a good deal for most Black Magic. Using Rapture before a cure, on the other hand, makes that cure come out far more slowly. Too slowly, in many cases. That's a big part of what I was getting at when I mentioned the time required to use a stratagem. Yeah, it's another choice, but rarely the right choice.

Using stratagems for AoE status cures is more useful, but that's also something Red Mage or White Mage can do through Scholar sub. Which is a good thing, since it really improved the tedious part of playing White Mage and I assume it does the same for Red Mage.

To be really brief, the main thing Scholar and Red Mage have in common is that most people who play either job would be happy to see more unique and useful spells. The former needs something a bit more potent than 1 TP a tick regain and mediocre Helix damage, and the latter hasn't gotten anything new in forever and a day because it's generally so good at filling it's niche.

[Seriha]

Potential homogenization between SCH and RDM is very real come 99 without SE throwing in some major monkey wrenches. That's a problem, and one Ketaru tried to skirt around mentioning the sword thing as a diversifier like it shouldn't matter. What gets me is how some are talking about how either job is constantly hopping back and forth between roles when ideally one should be solidified before you even leave the mog house. Sure, accidents can happen where suddenly if I was originally at a fight on SCH to play pseudo-BLM I need to hop into Add: White to cover for a weakened WHM, but that's not really a scenario you should be hoping for and using it as "But...!" to determine who's better at any given moment. As is, both RDM and SCH suffer from being the "not WHM" of the healing jobs, and while some want to stomp up and down over how both need Cure V, I really hope that's a route SE doesn't take, and not just because I'm averse to Pink Magery. Rather, it strikes me more as a lack of creativity and coming up with alternative methods to either cure people or mitigate damage.

As for RDM's "black magic" side, if someone said we wouldn't have gotten T4s with the cap increases, I wouldn't have grumbled. With that, SCH could've stayed T4 with Helix IIs popping up. That hasn't matched the reality of things, but I'm otherwise okay with leaving our nukes as is once we get Thunder IV. If SE wants to throw out some nuke/enfeeble hybrids like Impact (just much more MP economical x.x), they're free to. I'd still like to see SCH get better Helix spells and perhaps T2 Storms for double weather. From the RDM perspective, I'm jealous of SCH's duration doubling strat. If Haste can ever be AoE'd, for the small cost of 96s of strats, a SCH would be able to Haste 6 people for 6 minutes (something where, individually, we need a bunch of equipment to approach). Hell, they'd be able to do it cross-party once Haste goes off recast, too. And for all we know, the new "merits" could let them bolster that effect even further.

Either way, while Arts/Strat limitations can be a factor, I still stand behind the fact your role should be better pegged before heading out. In the off chance you might want to be a nuking SCH, though status cures will help, giving up some FC/MATK from /RDM to go /WHM might be in order. That way you can stay in Add: Black, only having to deal with slightly higher MP costs and (re)cast times for those things. Asking a SCH or RDM to deliberately spread themselves thin is just asking for disaster, especially if dealing with PUGs. Both deserve more to shake them from being a WHM or BLM -1, though.