Rejoice!

[saevel]

Part of RDM's ultimate flaw is the fact that SCH exists. Because SCH can do everything RDM can do but better, except for melee.

Pretty much. The job SE should of never created, yet it's too late to stop it now.

[Hashmalum]

Pretty much. The job SE should of never created, yet it's too late to stop it now.

It's sad but true. SCH, as it was brought into FF11, was one of several jobs that was fundamentally misconceived--brought into Vana'diel without a soul of its own and for all the wrong reasons. They made a job that was mostly meant to exist as a subjob--basically, a job half-alive and half-dead--and it has struggled to fill the emptiness inside with roles stolen from other jobs ever since. Like a vampire, SCH was (re)born wrong. It is inherently parasitic; in such a situation, it is impossible for both predator and prey to both thrive. And as far as I can tell, both SCH and it's fellow stunted half-job DNC were created basically because the dev team knew that players like new jobs, and here were two from previous games that hadn't been done yet. (The equally misconceived PUP showed how bad things went when they tried to create a new never-before-seen job, and they were already lowballing things as it was by recycling so many areas in that expansion, so they stayed safe and went for the fanservice.)

[Carth]

A bit off topic, but since it was talked about, I would say DNC at least in concept was a well-made job. At the beginning, it was poorly conceived. Lacked abilities, low damage, and a general misconception from the playerbase at large on how it was meant to be played. But after a few updates and learning the job, it's definitely the most unique class that was ever made by SE. Unfortunately the same can't be said on SCH, which I'm almost 100% positive they made the job mainly as a mage subjob.

[Hashmalum]

A bit off topic, but since it was talked about, I would say DNC at least in concept was a well-made job. At the beginning, it was poorly conceived. Lacked abilities, low damage, and a general misconception from the playerbase at large on how it was meant to be played. But after a few updates and learning the job, it's definitely the most unique class that was ever made by SE. Unfortunately the same can't be said on SCH, which I'm almost 100% positive they made the job mainly as a mage subjob.

Admittedly, DNC is still better off than SCH for a number of reasons--but even so, SE has still struggled to fill out the job at higher levels. Honestly, look at Ternary Flourish and tell me that they knew where they were going here. Or poaching Dual Wield from NIN--is that really a sign of a job conception that was solid from the beginning? But the subjob levels, those are fine. SE said outright that making both SCH and DNC good subjobs was a design objective from the beginning.

Of course, Scholar has been troubled ever since its beginning early in the Final Fantasy series. The very first SCH was in FF3, and it had the dubious honor of being the most worthless job in the game. Its only ability--not just its only unique ability, its only ability--was being able to see an enemy's elemental weakness, and this was valuable in precisely one fight in the entire game where the long-running Barrier Change ability was first born. From this inauspicious origin, SCH has had to have abilities from other jobs cobbled onto it to keep it viable ever since.

SCH's next appearance was in the FF3 remake for the DS. This version added a dispel effect to the weakness scan, and added some black and white magic as well as poaching Chemist's ability to double the healing of potions. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2 kept only the weakness scan, and swapped out the dispel effect for the ability to see the target's equipped items and hidden loot. The black and white magic were swapped out for a bizarre bunch of novel and not seen since abilities with no real unifying theme; FFTA2 SCH could deal non-elemental damage to one race of your choice on both sides (RACISTS!), deal several arbitrarily chosen elemental damage types to everyone on both sides, give a random buff to one target, or raise status resistance in a small area. Friendly fire and racism didn't make for a very compelling job, so the lack of stolen job abilities really hurt SCH here.

Then WotG came out with our SCH--except that it didn't yet have Embrava/Kaustra or any of the addendum spells (no -na, no Dispel or Sleep, no Reraise, only RDM-tier nukes), any merits, and lacked basic utility spells like Sneak and Invisible. It also hadn't yet had the "_______ over Time" or "enmity management" roles clumsily grafted onto it, so helixes were much higher level, WHM hadn't had its highest level Regen spell poached from it yet, and effects like Adloquium, Animus, the -enmity arts, and Libra were completely absent. Oh, and in keeping with Tanaka's infamous "mushroom strategy" of player management, the iconic SCH ability of seeing a foe's elemental weaknesses was (and still is) completely absent.

The third Chocobo's Dungeon was the next appearance of SCH and again it was quite different from its predecessors. The weakness scan was kept, and it received two more informational abilities; one of which identified unidentified items (a major game mechanic in the Chocobo's Dungeon series) and the other of which filled out the player's mini-map of the current level including traps, items, and enemies (Chocobo's Dungeon's main distinguishing gameplay mechanic has always been dropping the player into randomly generated dungeons with randomly placed traps, items, and enemies). Aside from that, it had a couple of abilities to temporarily boost item effectiveness, a couple of self-healing abilities, and the ability to cast a completely random spell.

Final Fantasy 4: The After Years gave us a Scholar character whose weakness scan also had a Dispel tacked on to it as well as adding a new elemental weakness, and could also Gil Toss (originally introduced with FF5's SAM). Sadly she could do nothing else on her own except stab, shoot, or whip things and was not terribly useful. Finally Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light gave us a scholar mostly unrelated to those who had come before, having some black and white magic competency and a quartet of strange abilities that would temporarily lower the stats of all enemies (but no weakness scan).

So as you can see, in the face of this mess, it's hardly surprising that the dev team has struggled to find a role for our SCH job. In fact, the job was considered so non-iconic that between its introduction in FF3 in 1990 and FF3's rerelease 16 years later, not a single game featured a scholar job or had a character who you could plainly say, "Yes, he's obviously a Scholar". In fact nearly half a dozen job system games have chosen to pass up the chance to have SCH as one of their jobs (FF5, FF Tactics, FF Tactics Advance, FF Dimensions, and the as-yet-not-translated Bravely Default: Flying Fairy). SCH's fairly unimpressive track record to date would suggest that they were wise to do so.

[Economizer]

Or poaching Dual Wield from NIN--is that really a sign of a job conception that was solid from the beginning?

Considering that for 1h weapons it is Dual Wield or be a shield using Paladin, not really.

The job trait is the only way for 1h jobs to get significant amounts of delay reduction, even if you happen to lose TP when you get high enough amounts of haste to start eating into the delay cap.

SE recently gave this statement about the possibility of giving Last Resort out to 1h jobs as well as 2h jobs, despite that same delay cap existing:

Currently, the development team plans to have the proposed Last Resort haste benefit only apply to two-handed weapons. The reason being is there are already a number of benefits that single-handed weapons posses such as dual wield, martial arts, etc.

Consider that the only way to even come close (and you won't even quite hit it) to the delay cap while single wielding a 1h weapon is to have a Dancer with fully merited Haste Samba, full gear haste, and full magic haste, and when stacked in a high buff environment with haste abilities, Dual Wield drains TP gain, you'll find that this statement is disappointingly insulting to 1h jobs, considering their first post regarding this was about buffing 1h weapons!

Also consider that you also get an extra hit on your weapon skill with DW, which significantly boosts damage for most weapon skills, and that you can equip another weapon with stats buffing your character (especially important when there are less then ten shields worth wearing in the game, and none of the non-Paladin ones even come close to buffs that weapons give), you can see why there are further nails in the coffin for any chance at not using DW unless you're a Paladin.

Shields don't and will probably never contribute to 1h weapons damage, and not having native DW means you can't sub WAR to help compensate for the attack problems against high level mobs. Shields also don't really contribute enough to defense unless your job is Paladin to have significant effects. So short of 1h weapons taking on the attributes of 2h weapons when single wielded, or shields at least auto-blocking AoE moves not targeted on the user to reduce some damage, it really is DW or go home.

Giving Dancer Dual Wield was probably one of the best design decisions SE could have made considering.

WHM hadn't had its highest level Regen spell poached from it yet, and effects like Adloquium,

Admittedly, while Scholar has its problems, having Regen spells, while being really crapily implemented, is an okay deal for White Mages.

I won't remotely try to argue with Scholar's implementation being a bit dirty, I don't know that I could. But Scholar taking the Regen crown isn't all that horrible.

Ever since AF3 sets came out, using Regen hasn't be an MP efficient way to heal anything. Cures are just too efficient for White Mages by comparison. Scholars on the other hand get all those nice stratagem charges to throw around. White Mages don't get much use out of Regen's main reason for casting (MP efficiency), whereas Scholars do (with proper strats, it can stand toe to toe with single target cure efficiency that WHM has). As a White Mage, I'd be more worried about Cure VI being a such a crappy spell at this point or even rather get worried about Scholars getting a castable light weather buff then I'd be worried about Regen spells in general.

That isn't to say White Mages don't have reason to have complaint. They still have a merit category wasted by Regen spells that will never match up to that of a Scholar's (to be fair, it isn't like any good White Mage was using it since AF3 pants though). This is further made a problem since Cleric's Briault augments Regen, as well as the Orison Mitts, and the Marduk's Tiara +1 (which as far as I know, SCH cannot wear either).

As a bit of a side point, Red Mages have even more reason to complain, because at this point they should have Regen III by now (and if you really think about it, no real reason for them not to have Regen IV, considering there is nothing WHM would really be losing).

[Tamarsamar]

So short of 1h weapons taking on the attributes of 2h weapons when single wielded

This is actually a brilliant idea. Hop to it, dev team! And give us Fencer, too, while you're at it! (Actually, they might be better off renaming that dang Job Trait at this point, in the wake of the upcoming Rune Fencer . . .)

(It's also worth noting that one-handed weapons are at yet another inherent disadvantage against two-handed weapons except at extremely low Delay values, since between 180 and 530 Delay TP returns per hit are calculated so that 100 TP is reached after roughly 60 seconds un-Hasted, but because higher delay/two-handed weapons tend to have higher DMG values, DPS balance tends to be distorted in favor of the weapon types that drop the bigger Weapon Skills. And of course, further exacerbating issues is, among other things, the whole Samurai job . . .)

[Ophannus]

Well even with these buffs, it's hard to say. We really do need /SCH for Dark Arts to even stand a chance of not getting resisted on endgame mobs (Odin/Legion etc), otherwise you're just wasting your MP. It is good news though, especially considering RDM gets pretty top-tier nuking stuff gear the past few years. I'd rather them buff our enfeebling or enhancing though since that's what makes us unique, I mean this update will benefit SCH and BLM mostly so since they're getting buffed too, we're probably going to be right where we are after the update -- behind SCH and BLM still for nuking. I'd much rather them buff our specialty, as they've already enhanced our healing and now nuking, it's hightime they buff our enhancing before Rune Fencer comes out and destroys our Enspells.