What would bring me back to Scholar

SCH was the only job I played in ARR and one of the two jobs I played up until ShB killed it. Nothing that made SCH fun or enjoyable to me survived ShB's gutting of the job and it's effectively been dead to me since. Here's what I would say needs to happen:

1. Miasma and Shadowflare need to return. By themselves, they do not resolve the issues with SCH's gameplay issues, but they were a part of SCH's core identity and should never have been pruned. If Shadowflare's clash with Sacred Soil cannot be fixed, then just either replace Sacred Soil with something that's not a bubble or prune it based on if other changes render it unnecessary.

2. Expand on SCH's gameplay loop, potentially taking inspiration from how PVP SCH's Recitation works. You want to work toward gaining this buff that perhaps augments your offensive spells, like upgrading Biolysis into a third DoT, Pain, and upgrading Broil into Fester which deals more damage the more DoTs the opponent has like old SMN. Also, let's make Deployment Tactics double as a Bane effect like it does in PVP.

3. Reorganize and reevaluate SCH's Gauges and healing resources. The Fey Gauge and Aetherflow shouldn't both be healing resources. I'd suggest that the Fey Gauge become SCH's main resource for healing, and Aetherflow be reformed to fit into that Recitation loop I suggested in part 2--becoming an offensive gauge. Then, clean up and organize SCH's healing library for itself and its faeries to actually work cohesively and make sense thematically. Perhaps take a bit of inspiration from SMN's pet summons as well and have specific OGCD heals change depending on your pet and make switching faeries a part of SCH's gameplay.

What would make me play SCH is being back the dots and make it a proper poison mage. SCH is a tactical, military doctor so they could definitely lean into using poisons in order to weaken defenses.

People love to say that the fairies are fine the way they are but the reality couldn't be any further from the truth.

The fairy is as disconnected from SCH as cards are on AST now. It's literally just a beacon for healing which is fine but that's literally it.

Say what you will about SB SCH, but being able to have your fairy cast their own abilities while you're casting Broil felt like you had better control over the fairy and being able to tell it who to Embrace.

Slowly, they're deleting the fairy from SCH because they're also trying to delete pets in general.

But yeah bring back decision-making SCH and build on that foundation. Aetherflow needs to go. It has a false sense of choice and aged very poorly on SCH. SGE got the better version and WHM got an incentive to actually heal.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

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.

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This is at least partially why I want healers to get tools that reward them with MORE damage for healing well. For GCD healers that means subverting taxes on their baseline spells through good timing/efficiency (Ex. Breaking shields, or avoiding overhealing on regen ticks/burst heals), and for oGCD healers that means having dumps like energy drain as an alternative for certain heals. All healers can be rewarded for engaging with their resources at a baseline level on top of that layer of consideration. Lilies and Quickened Aetherflow, while stupid for other reasons, are examples of that.

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Originally Posted by Grimoire-M

oGCD healers that means having dumps like energy drain as an alternative for certain heals.

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I am honestly really skeptical about having a single resource being able to be used for Healing or Damage. As longs as DPS is the only metric that truly matters in fights and you give healers alternative ways to heal without expending said resource ( Whispering Wind, Recitation, Fey Blessing, etc. ), any time dealing damage competes with healing its going to feel awful to heal. As long as healing requirements stay this low, using any of the SCH abilities for healing will always feel like a waste.

If ED must go, please replace it with Miasma, Shadowflare, and let Deployment Tactics spread DoTs/Chain please.

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Originally Posted by Grimoire-M

This is at least partially why I want healers to get tools that reward them with MORE damage for healing well. For GCD healers that means subverting taxes on their baseline spells through good timing/efficiency (Ex. Breaking shields, or avoiding overhealing on regen ticks/burst heals), and for oGCD healers that means having dumps like energy drain as an alternative for certain heals. All healers can be rewarded for engaging with their resources at a baseline level on top of that layer of consideration. Lilies and Quickened Aetherflow, while stupid for other reasons, are examples of that.

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Healers need an overhaul. It's really just that simple. GCD heals at this point feel really awful to use because there's no benefit to them outside of level synch or crap hitting the fan.
If Regen had a Proc that functioned like Thundercloud on BLM, Addlo granted Fairy Gauge on breaking, or A.Benefic doubled the duration of a card thrown on that player, would we have the same opinion on GCD heals as we did now? They'd be infinitely more useful if they had secondary benefits like these that's for sure and while not perfect in any regards, it would at least add a layer of complexity to jobs that is currently lacking from Healer Design.

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Originally Posted by GrimGale

I am honestly really skeptical about having a single resource being able to be used for Healing or Damage. As longs as DPS is the only metric that truly matters in fights and you give healers alternative ways to heal without expending said resource ( Whispering Wind, Recitation, Fey Blessing, etc. ), any time dealing damage competes with healing its going to feel awful to heal. As long as healing requirements stay this low, using any of the SCH abilities for healing will always feel like a waste.

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without any choice, theres nothing left to optimize beyond gcd uptime. if everyone has a million free healing tools and no damage to thin them out then gameplay is just 111 with your choice of heals sprinked between. emphasis on just. healer gameplay has always also included planning out heals to make the best of them. if you remove any chance to fail even at that, any choice and any opportunity cost, which is the only thing healers really have anymore, then what are healers going to be left with? no dps rotation, nothing to heal, nothing to even plan for since everything is free. if anything we need MORE things that compete with dps to at least make heal planning interesting. we somehow managed for 3 expansions straight but now its suddenly the devil.

obviously you can argue that the real problem is the 1111 rotation, but i dont think we got to where we are because of just one thing. healer gameplay used to have many things going on and they got gameplay elements shaved away little by little. i dont think any one healer gameplay element is more important than another because theyre all dependent of each other.

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Originally Posted by Grimoire-M

This is at least partially why I want healers to get tools that reward them with MORE damage for healing well. For GCD healers that means subverting taxes on their baseline spells through good timing/efficiency (Ex. Breaking shields, or avoiding overhealing on regen ticks/burst heals), and for oGCD healers that means having dumps like energy drain as an alternative for certain heals. All healers can be rewarded for engaging with their resources at a baseline level on top of that layer of consideration. Lilies and Quickened Aetherflow, while stupid for other reasons, are examples of that.

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Unfortunately this doesn't work when you have a co-heal.
Breaking shields isn't too difficult but avoiding overheal on HoT's is almost impossible if you're paired with a healbot who doesn't care about damage and blindly spams heals when you put up a HoT.

I have no interest in more Energy Drains either. I'm fine if we leave it as a SCH gimmick for those players who get the feeling of making big brain plays by pressing an oGCD when there's nothing to heal, but it doesn't enhance gameplay for me.
oGCD's vs GCD's already cover this to an extent anyway, because your oGCD's are free but if you mismanage them or use them badly, you have to dip into GCD heals which are a straight up loss. Thus you're rewarded for mapping and planning your free resources well.

I'd rather the heal toolkit and dps toolkit were separate but both involved some braincells to use and rewarded you for mastering it.

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Originally Posted by QooEr

without any choice, theres nothing left to optimize beyond gcd uptime. if everyone has a million free healing tools and no damage to thin them out then gameplay is just 111 with your choice of heals sprinked between. emphasis on just. healer gameplay has always also included planning out heals to make the best of them. if you remove any chance to fail even at that, any choice and any opportunity cost, which is the only thing healers really have anymore, then what are healers going to be left with? no dps rotation, nothing to heal, nothing to even plan for since everything is free. if anything we need MORE things that compete with dps to at least make heal planning interesting. we somehow managed for 3 expansions straight but now its suddenly the devil.

obviously you can argue that the real problem is the 1111 rotation, but i dont think we got to where we are because of just one thing. healer gameplay used to have many things going on and they got gameplay elements shaved away little by little. i dont think any one healer gameplay element is more important than another because theyre all dependent of each other.

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I do agree that choice is important. But then, spending resources on energy drain should be much more significant. 100 Potency seems too measly to be significant to optimize around.

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Originally Posted by GrimGale

I do agree that choice is important. But then, spending resources on energy drain should be much more significant. 100 Potency seems too measly to be significant to optimize around.

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energy drains are like 4-5% of a scholar's dps. thats not insignificant.