Originally Posted by
Tweets
You have perfectly encapsulated why Scholar was fun in the past. Whenever people disagree with how it was 'gutted', they only talk about how we went from 2 DoTs in 4.X to 1 in 5.0.
But that's a technicality, isn't it? That's pulling up figures from a time in which things were pretty bad to point at and say "Look, it's not too much of a loss!" 4.X SCH wasn't very fun, because it lost so much from 3.X. What little remained was then taken away in 5.0. To discuss it honestly, you need to look at what's changed over the lifetime of the class, and while I can't speak for 2.X as I did not play at the time, I can certainly say that since 3.X the amount of fun I have had playing SCH has decreased from a decent amount (I'd say 6-7/10) to the absolute gutter (1/10).
We went from 5 DoTs (Bio, Bio II, Miasma, Shadowflare, and Aero) in 3.X to 2 (Miasma, Bio II) in 4.X, and now to 1 (Biolysis) in 5.0. That's the problem here. For those of us who played SCH in 3.X we had a somewhat-engaging gameplay loop to look forward to of managing multiple discrete timers, a fairy, and and Aetherflow, and this gameplay loop was significantly eroded in 4.0 and has not been completely eroded in 5.0 with the removal of fairy control (by making her abilities clip and removing the ability to target Embrace), removing the vast majority of our DoTs, and simplifying Aetherflow so much (though this at least was improved in 5.05).