It still had Shadowflare in Stormblood. At least in 4.3 it did, can't remember what was missing from the job at launch.
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Note the question was not: What changes to SB SCH's kit could we make to make it good.
The question was: If we got SCH's SB kit back exactly as it was, would it still be regarded as good? Would that be acceptable?
Imagine waiting for 5 years of no update to your job or ANY job for that matter. That's basically what you are saying. Playing a Lv 70 toolkit at lv 100.
If you want to take that statement in hyperbole, then it feels lacking, but overall not to the point it's unplayable. Basically the same problem as SMN that feels like it's a lv 70 job toolkit but brought up to 90 and without more versatile skills to really flesh out the toolkit for lv 90 because the gameplay feels virtually the same after 70 thanks to the rotation being set in stone by lv 50. SB SCH's toolkit would have a good base for a lv 70 job, but if they were to only bring back the old toolkit without adding anything else, then it will still cause disappointment at how SE failed to develop anything new to the job for an extra 40 levels if that's how it is released in Dawntrail.
Expedient, Quickened Aetherflow, Reasons to use Energy Drain, etc. etc. would definitely feel better than it is now though. Seraph would probably be more responsive with SB SCH as well.
Because OP forced the question back to "what if we had Lv70 SCH with literally no changes or additions until now".
Bluntly speaking, it would be a fun healer to play as mentioned before, but for obvious reasons it would lack a variety of tools and traits given to them with potentially harsher mitigation or heal checks.
Yeah Critlo spread was powerful, but you didn't have it all the time. You'd also lose out on:
- Lv74 Recitation - losing critical consistency
- Lv76 Fey Blessing - a minor yet active AOE pet heal
- Lv78 Sacred Soil Trait - a HUGE margin of your AOE healing in regen form
- Lv80 Summon Seraph - a not entirely unsignificant AOE shield + heal usable on multi-hit AOEs.
- Lv85 GCD Heal Trait - boosting shield values to accomodate some of the raidwide damage
- Lv86 Protraction aka "Joy of Battle" - tossable baby-Thrill of Battle, helpful for Adlo-spread
- Lv88 Deploy. Tactics Trait - slashing the cooldown from 120s to 90s (i.e. more spreadlo)
- Lv90 Expedient - one of the best mitigation + movement tools to deal with a variety of mechanics
Losing ALL of that would be fairly significant in presence of Sage.
It would be far from enough, it would be stagnant at best. They need to bring back some of HW's kit with visual and gameplay tweaks. More interactions with the fairy, which I'd like to see function a bit like summoner, where you can command her to also do damage like applying one of the dots that was removed. Or for example, summoning Seraph gives you access to an empowered dot that you can keep and use at will so that it's just not a 2min dps cd, etc...
Personally I think it would be welcome. A kit that's good if stale to some vs the current appalling ones.
If you gave everyone in this thread a choice between being stuck with the shb kit for 4 years or the sb kit for 4 years, most would choose the latter.
my apologies, I genuinely struggled to remember. I didn't play sch much then. (felt it clashed with my catboi's aesthetic)