What would bring me back to Scholar

I would only ask to get Aetherflow reworked so Sch is not the only healer that doesn't want to heal with its gauge, selene back with its own kit, an expansion on the fairy gauge and more focus on fairy gameplay and an expansion on the dot gameplay we had before the Shb gutting with some other cooldowns and/or interactions to give depth to the job

personally I see two good routes to go down with sch's gauges
either scrap healing from energy drain and use it for dps buttons like bane, shadowflare, fester etc and use fae gauge for healing eg lustrate costs 25

or

scrap the fae gauge and change the healing buttons used via aetherflow to refund/reward with dps. Or you know, design it so you're encouraged to spend aetherflow on dpsing as you get better at healing which this game fails to do- provide incentives to get better at healing

If we make Energy Drain DPS neutral and a GCD, SCH no longer has any oGCD attacks and even further has the least amount of DPS options of any of the healers in the game. You never want to hit Ruin II and you'd only ever hit the new Energy Drain if you had left over stacks, I wouldn't count this as a DPS button button in the same way I don't count Toxicon II as part of SGE's in a ST scenario.
Would SCH get anything to supplement the lost DPS button and lost DPS and add more "button bloat" or would we just tell SCH to deal with it and suffer with only having Broil to spam for the sake of "free healing"?

Scholar is probably a prime candidate for an entire rework, but I don't have faith it'd be any better than what we current have :P

I am all for an entire rework at this point.
If the removal of one the two fairies, energy drain, fey blessing, seraph, dissipation, aetherpact/fey union and the entire job gauge wouldn't impact the core of how you can play scholar then that is bad job design.
You can heal most encounters only relying on soil, whispering dawn, recitation, excog, indom and spreadlo/adlo. Sure Consolation and the single target fairy shield is nice to have but thats about it.

What bothers me the most about playing scholar is that whenever people have valid concerns, everyone else starts memeing about how scholar is always meta and that there is nothing to complain about.

Honestly the only reason I don’t want SCH to get a rework because SE will not do it right. Sage IS proof of that as far as I’m concerned. All of the already good power of Scholar plus an excess of powerful cooldowns that are outright turning core parts of their kit into hi-ethers.

SCH may need QoL but Sage needs cooldowns outright pulled from their kit because of how much waste is inherently in it.

Despite their functionality being okay (it’s not as good as Scholar at long range healing and I’m okay with that given how broken they are overall), I cannot defend Sage’s design in the overall context of the game, because it is rife with the exact problems that got us here to begin with.

The quirks in Scholar’s kit are things we need more of. Not necessarily in the same format (one pet healer is enough), but the focus on allocating resources between DPS and healing, the need to combine multiple tools to solve specific problems, and working with a unique class feature to accomplish your role. If Dissipation were even half as jank as people make it out to be, we would be in Heavensward again. And that expansion’s gameplay was better overall in spite of the jank.

Really just bring back Shadowflare, it was a fun little thing on SCH and would bring a little something back to the job. They could add an AoE DoT to each of the healers for that matter.

Those changes would ruin scholar for me. Planning your aetherflow usage and when you lose access to your fairy adds a layer of complexity and skill expression the job. Sage is already a simplified clone of scholar so there's no need to call for the kit to be dumbed down when lots of people choose to main it specifically because it's the more challenging option.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

my beef with ast cards were they could have been cooler.

Spire would have been a better card had they not scrapped TP and resource management.

Ewer could have been an a solid card if it just did what it said on the tin.. tosses MP refresh on a BLM to extend there Astral Fire Phase or on a DRK to open up some serious dark arts chaos. could have been an effect that actually changed how jobs played. which imo would be infinitnely more interesting than like balance. which was your job plays the exact same just now your numbers are 5% or 10% higher...

i dont mind having parts of toolkits restricted but the trade off has to be worthwhile.. which is the big issue with dissipation. losing the fairy temporariliy is fine but the current trade off just isnt worth it. (clunkiness included). if they made healing magic potency straight healing potency dissipation would have a pretty decent pay off. oh and make stacks boost guage even under diisipation. another peeve..

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In the end.. it's just homogenization of Shadowbringers and content design remaining the same (highly scripted and predictable), with the existence of static inflexible 60 second to 120 second rotations that must be hit on demand, that led healers to lose more support utility overtime.

If there were more instances where bosses would lower damage considerably that it coincides with the burst window to the point it isn't worth doing the optimal DPS rotation, more dangerous add phases, and more variations of unscripted boss mechanics, I'd say there would be more places where utility support can come in. However, it's possible that it would cause a considerable problem to the current encounter design though because it would require change for less optimal skills that isn't entirely DPS based to take relevance. Sort of like PvP and decision making.

Though I believe that would require a heavy redesign of some job skills and fights.

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Originally Posted by Strawberry42

Those changes would ruin scholar for me. Planning your aetherflow usage and when you lose access to your fairy adds a layer of complexity and skill expression the job. Sage is already a simplified clone of scholar so there's no need to call for the kit to be dumbed down when lots of people choose to main it specifically because it's the more challenging option.

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While it can be argued that conflicting priority abilities add a layer of complexity, I don't particularly believe having abilities that work against themselves makes the class anymore interesting to play. As long as Energy Drain is a DPS gain, any other use for AF charges is effectively punishing you for using them to heal.

It's not a heavy punishment, some might argue its inconsecuential. It's just a 100 potency per charge, or 300 potency per minute. But then if you can say the damage gain is inconsecuential, then that would make the optimization around it inconsecuential aswell, therefore the layer of complexity that the choice provides is purely superficial. Why even have that in the first place.

Energy Drain optimization changes how we treat dissipation aswell. It's no longer an emergency CD that you use to get healing. It's a 300 potency DPS buff that locks you out of a part of your kit. Choices are fine. Problem is, there is no real reason to use Dissipation beyond the DPS gain. As a Scholar you don't really want to touch your GCD heals, as your healing comes mainly from your Fairy and your oGCD heals (Though those are mildly punished by Energy Drain loss.)

There must be someway to make SCH interesting without punishing the use of its healing kit.

Not to be a total doomer (just musing here), but I think the combat system puts a real damper on creating kits that provide meaningful choice. So long as DPS is the end-all-be-all of metrics, it's always the "correct" choice. You can make choices more interesting if you have things like impactful debuffs, or crowd control, or boss placement, or threat shenanigans, but those have all been sacrificed to the dumpster of making DPS king.