[Job Adjustmentｓ Manifesto] RDM

[Ketaru]

This sums up a lot of my thoughts about the way Scholar works or should work. Wasn't a Scholar a supportive mage in the lore? It makes things favorable to the party, then proceeds to add extra magical damage or healing as the situation needs it.

Traditionally, there...is no real definitive image of what Scholar is. As it is, it's a very uncommon available class in Final Fantasy.

Just browsing a Final Fantasy wikia for a bit, it looks like the III DS version is as close to the XI version as any, with the ability to cast a variety of both white and black magic. It looks like all they did was determine enemy weaknesses in the original III. A running theme of the job though is it determines enemy weaknesses and scans enemies.

In IV: The After Years, they knew Gil Toss.

The Scholar that I'm most familiar with, aside from the XI one, is the one from Tactics A2, which actually specialized in dealing attacks that potentially dealt damage to all units in the field, including your own, and one you had to actually build teams and gear sets around to capitalize on. They also had the ability to scan enemies and tell you what kind of items can be stolen from a given enemy.

My impression of the XI Scholar is that it's a combination job of previous ones like Geomancer and Oracle/Sage/Lunarian/Seer or whatever else the extreme magic specialist of the game happens to be called this time.

[Economizer]

By lore I meant FFXI store line stuff. I may be mistaken.

I should probably be more clear by what I mean by supportive, what I meant was Scholar does stuff like Geomancer type buffs, and more importantly, is able to switch between damage and healing to assist in these functions, ideally in a group that has both of these roles mostly covered already.

[Raksha]

For the time being, Haste is a major part of what Red Mage is, although not a unique one, but Red Mage is the best at Hasting the most people currently. While I'm not sure that giving Accession Haste to Scholar would stop them from trying to get Cure V, I do know it would have a major impact on the game. Thank goodness that SE isn't ever going to do this. Also, if your a Scholar that thinks this is a good idea in our current game environment, for the love of all things remotely sane, never produce any game.

Would you feel the same way if haste was party only, and composure increased the duration on everyone?

I levelled RDM to 75 and I hate haste cycles as much as the next guy, but once /RDM gives haste I'm afraid I'll be stuck hasting all the time again.

The answer IMO is to make an AoE'able haste that is less insane. One person being able to Haste an entire alliance is pretty crazy.

[Greatguardian]

I would scream if Haste was made party-only at this stage of the game. No, thank you.

Composure does increase buff duration on everyone when you cast in AF3+2 set, though.

Edit: That's part of what floors me about buffing complaints, really. 5/5 AF3+2 plus AF3 cape is basically double duration on all buffs cast on others with Composure active =/

[Economizer]

On everyone's haste suggestions ever:

The best solution would be a way to punch people through the Internet that ask for Haste and aren't the tank, but I'm trying to think of a realistic answer.

I remember leveling with random people in Abyssea when leveling Summoner and having them ask for Haste. No thank you, I'm not going to work harder then everyone in the party to swap avatars constantly, and I'm not going to main Garuda, because I want to use a different summon so I can get skillups faster. Sometimes I wish there was a way to make people forget you have Haste with casual content because they all think they are entitled to lazily auto-attack and WS mobs while mage jobs work their ass off to make them slightly more efficient on a mob that you don't really need to be super efficient on. Yes, there is content where everyone should ideally be Hasted, but sheesh.

Would you feel the same way if haste was party only, and somehow composure increased the duration on everyone?

Composure does increase duration if you have AF3+2 and the cape on, to about 1.65 of duration. This is not close enough to Scholar's double duration stratagem if Scholar could Accession it (since they can't, it costs an arm and a leg in strats to do it otherwise).

Making Haste party only to convenience SCH and /SCH doesn't sound like a good solution. It breaks current setups where people Haste cross party. Party target Hastaga would be a better solution, but Red Mage has a distinct lack of aga spells. Even doing something the devs would probably never do, like programming Haste to only target party if you use Ascension would still considerably favor Scholars. Two strats so you don't have to cast Haste for six minutes? You still have 5.5 strats to work with. There aren't a lot of solutions that are better then the status quo, sadly. Balance is hard.

[Greatguardian]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Enhancing magic duration effects on AF3+2 feet, AF3 cape, and Af3 set are multiplicative, which makes it 1.5 x 1.2 x 1.1 = 1.98, not 1.65?

Honestly, Haste is so far and away from a big deal to me that I'd be wondering why the melees don't have it in the first place that they'd need to whine for it. It's second nature at this point that everyone can and should be hasted at all times =/

[SpankWustler]

Unless most posted information on the effects of the Estoqueur stuff is wrong, yeah, it's multiplicative. So...

Scholar can double the duration of buffs using a stratagem.

Red Mage can very nearly double the duration of buffs by being properly dressed for the occasion.

So, if somebody at SE fell into a pile of heroin and stumbled out feeling joyful enough to allow Haste to work with Ascension, it would be a pretty even break. This line of discussion seems kind of pointless, though, given that most people don't leave their piles of heroin laying around to be tripped over.

As for spell division, I've come to assume Scholar will get the weirder, more situational stuff while Red Mage will get bread and butter spells.

[Economizer]

I forgot about the bonus on the boots, which is why I had the odd number of 1.65. Thanks for the correction.

While this certainly changes much of what I said (it only gives SCH a slight edge in this case), I still doubt SE will allow Haste to Ascension. Or if they do, it will be the second before they announce Haste II.

[Raksha]

What I meant was what if compsure alone increased buff duration on others, with gear just enhancing that further.

That would put a composured Haste far above a perpetuanced one, and means RDM could just use one strat to make it AoE, but SCH would still need two (accession + perpetuance).

What are the other suggestions for getting rid of haste cycles? Hastega? (For RDM only? What about SCH/RDM? Are we doomed to Haste Cycles now? WHM/SCH too?)

[Supersun]

The ideal solution really is to AoE, but I can somewhat understand if the Dev team wants a challenge to find another way without breaking thematic lore.

From there they can either continue to increase the duration and decrease the casting time like what WoW did with Plds where their 5 min buffs that they were expected to keep on 40 people eventually became 15 min buffs that buffed 40 people in a matter of like 6 clicks.

Other then that if they pulled it off right they could also pretty much give out haste to jobs like they did sneak and invisible. I mean if every DD had haste that they could cast on themselves it wouldn't be as necessary to dedicate hastes to just one job. I mean this is an extreme example but if content encouraged lots of players and each alliance had plenty of hastes then it wouldn't be as burdensome.

They would have to implement this properly though as even with haste being more common there are still more incentives for certain jobs to cast haste over other people for efficiencies sake. They would need to make incentives for people to spread out the hastes instead of bunching them on as few people as possible.