Consolidated Scholar 4.0 Feedback Thread

Excog should be spread by deployment tactics and heal if it expires.

Dissipation: should have the fairy aoe heal potency 250 every 3 seconds until the fay gauge is empty the it unsummons. If the fairy is still active at the end of the 30s the fairy does not unsummon.
Dissipation makes zero sense in a post fay gauge world. We need more senergy back.

fey union should not use up fairy gauge when the target goes out of range. rigjt now usong union plants the fairy in olace. when your target runs 10y away it stays there and continues to drain your gauge. ran all mihgo and didn't cancel the tether while the scientist boss cast his soul rip ability and I couldn't cancel the union. it drained the gauge from 100 to 0 before I could get to my body.

great..

Can't honestly say I've noticed a difference between 3.X and 4.X for SCH. Honestly, the dps was too good, it needed the nerf bat.

Feedback:

Fey Union: The range really needs to be increased. 10 yalms is pretty small. The potency needs to be increased, its a fairly marginal gain over just Embrace-spam. I've also heard that Rouse doesn't work with it. Really????

Excog: This should be deployable.

Chain Strategem: This should be bane-able

It's kinda embarrassing how these new abilities don't even work with the SCHs existing toolkit.

It feels like a lot of SCH's keypoints got butchered.

-From 4 to 2 DoTs, we lose a lot of our variety and have an overall decrease in damage. The changes make us have an overall lower potency contribution and stray away from the "DPS healer" role fantasy so many of us seemed to enjoy

-With the loss of 2 DoTs, also, we spend a lot more time casting Broil which uses more mp than DoTs. That means mp depletes rather quickly, and with Adloq's reduced shields and Succor's healing compared to the other classes', we're using more mana than ever.

-Don't even get me started on how sad the Aetherflow nerfs are.

-I think we all know how awful our AoE is now. Another sad fact is that while our AoE DoTs get butchered, Aero 3 seems be just fine. And of course, I don't even need to add the fact we don't have a big, spammable nuke like Gravity or Holy! Shadowflare's changes are nice, but in the end it's still only 250 potency. And of course, we could use it for pre-pulls.

(Sorry for the double post, but character limit!)

That being said, a quick overview of my part on the new actions we've learned.

-Excognitation: Giving someone an 'trigger heal' is a really cool concept and it fits the Scholar's theme. That being said, a 30s duration chance of healing someone for only 50 potency more than Lustrate sucks. I think Excog should either have a way longer duration, heal for more, and either not cost aetherflow at all or give the SCH an Aetherflow stack back if it expires.

-Chain Stratagem: Awesome skill, damage boosts are always welcome, but it lasts too little and has a pretty huge cooldown. I hate making comparisons, but in 120 seconds an AST can use Draw 4 times...

-Quickened Aetherflow: Proc rate is way too small and the reward itself is pretty. It's a welcome passive, but too mediocre and passable at the same time. Should reward us with more or have a higher proc rate.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Reiryuu

I am not sure SE knows how to balance healers... I wonder if they even play healers in PVE... =/

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They most certainly do not know how to balance these classes. At the end of hw the three classes were pretty balanced with whm being slightly weaker. All they needed to do was give whm some raid utility and they would have been fine. But instead they decided to buff ast, which I haven't heard a single ast say they needed that buff, then give them the coolest toys. They then gutted sch in every department and gave whm a dumb system. I tried my whm (though it is only lvl 60) in content that with my sch it was extremely difficult to heal through and I did it with ease. Sure, sch has never been known to be the great healer, but to gut us where we are forced to heal then punish us with bad mp management? Excuse me se did you EVER play sch? One of our main things other than being a damage mitigater (now out shined by noct ast) was being the healer that had a larger mp pool. So now we have a healer class that had a buff that it did not need out doing the other two traditional healing jobs of ffxiv, and healer that can at least heal but is as useful to a raid situation as a wet rag with the added bonus of a clunky system, and a class that no one should be taking anywhere if they are sane. I at least have the added bonus of being a good healer, but my friends who love sch and playing it casually now cannot play sch. It's almost as if we're back to square one of 3.0 only instead of ast being the pos healer, its sch. So I guess come 4.4 we'll finally be balanced with the other two healers.

Yeah, I got SCH to level 70, and I'm also really disappointed by the way it handles. I'll stay with the job because I love how healers have to juggle healing, mechanics, and DPS in this game in a way that pure DPSing never appealed to me, and the Cleric Stance changes have made it a lot more fluid to play, but if I were smarter than I was stubborn, I would be switching to WHM/AST. Already, I'm hearing anecdotes of SCHs being kicked from parties because it's now so much more difficult to be a SCH that can actually get people through content. My friend and I had to kick one the other day because their Physics/Aldos weren't enough to keep my tank friend alive even with all of their CDs used, even with only one pack of mobs at a time. And then another healer friend's Susanoo Normal party had to kick another SCH to clear because they kept on running out of MP. Because the potencies are so low and the mana management is so bad, it's a lot harder for newer players to jump into content compared to AST/WHM, but because there's much less that rewards skilled players who can exploit limited healing tools to make time elsewhere, now that DoTs upkeep is trivial, pet management is less impactful, and there's no AoE. I don't understand the design motivation behind making it both more difficult to play and less rewarding once you get past that difficulty.

What I would want, and I'm trying to be reasonable about the bare minimums they could do here:
- Revert Aetherflow to 20% MP so that we can rely upon it solely instead of bringing Lucid Dreaming. This goes hand-in-hand with my next change...
- Make Break AoE. WHM and AST have no reason to take it, because they have their much better Gravity/Holy. SCH now no longer has to take Lucid Dreaming, but is forced to take Break for an AoE. Boom, balanced.
- If Bane was too much, fine. If SE doesn't want to make the drop-off 50% like almost every other strong AoE in the game, at least make the splash drop off impact duration instead of potency. Right now, there's no way for me to see which mobs received the 20% potency splash. It would be much easier if I could see that one mob got only 6 seconds of a DoT, and then reapplied the DoT as it came off. Bonus is that we can now choose to spam Bane at different burst points, in exchange for sacrificing a whole bunch of Aetherflow stacks, as the highest duration will apply.
- Revert Aldoquium to its original MP cost, or at least make it the same shield potency as AST Aspected Benefic. I don't understand why SCH shields are weaker (or just about the same when it crits) AND more expensive AND have a cast time versus AST. It's entirely inferior. For SCHs into more casual gameplay, they're going to run out of MP using it while being unable to shield big hits with it because of its long cast time. For skilled players, there's no bonus in dealing with all of these cons when a better version is just a class change away - and believe me, people are going to pressure the shit out of SCH to change our healing classes from now on, especially in statics.
- Make Succor cheaper as well, while we're at it. I don't understand why a 150 potency heal and 150 shield is the same MP cost as Cure III, which is almost double the combined potency of Succor. And unlike Cure III, you can't just spam Succor. Even during repeated raid AoEs, you have to put some thought into timing it because the shields don't stack. Again, this is the same motif we're seeing with SCH now. More work than either of the two healers, for less reward.

Honestly the issues that SCH suffer are from the fact that both SMN and SCH share the same base class and it's clear that SE is not sure how to balance one and the other.

SMN and SCH AoE was a bit much - it did need to be nerfed. I don't know if I agree with the extent of which it was nerfed. And I don't mind pressing 2-3 buttons for DPS. I mean whitemage press 3 at most - stone and 2 aero dots. For AoE - holy, aero and assize. So across the board healers don't have many buttons to pressing when doing damage. That's not a problem (imo).

In terms of actually issues - mana management and healing potencies are not where they need to be. But unlike whitemage I don't think scholars issue with healing derives with design.

If SE buffs the potencies the class should be fine for a healing role. I think the skills and class mechanics can work if they're at a place where the healing actually works.

While I don't think SCHs can't clear content (my boyfriend has sticked to Scholar and we've been100% fine throughout the dungeons and trials while I tank), I also think there's way too many negatives piled up on the job now.


The AoE damage, as everyone's said, is negligible, and the healing potency went down while the MP costs went up. Someone explain to me why Broil II is so much more expensive than Stone IV and Malefic III even when tho SCH has now the same amount of DoTs as WHM?

It also seems that the devs think Eos and Selene are a SCH's answer to Regen and Aspected Benefic, but Embrace was always a SCH's answer to both the regens and Cure II and Benefic II. By gutting Embrace (the 50 potency nerf is felt much more due to the bad relative scaling of Pet attributes), we are left with a worse regen and a worse answer for Cure II. SCH's only answer to that is now technically Adloquium, by potencies alone, ET+Adlo directly, but with the MP cost being so high it can't be relied upon, and has been one of the main reasons a lot of Scholars have found themselves lacking for MP in levelling content. It's just horrible, horrible design.

Another thing that is terrible by design: Quickened Aetherflow. I've seen a lot of people defend it, but the unpredictable CD reduction makes it so you don't even benefit from it sometimes. When you're preparing for unknown mechanics, it is common practice to save up Aetherflow stacks until the recast is almost done, so if you do this and proc the trait you get absolutely nothing out of it. Whoop-dee-fucking-doo.

Scholar is garbage now.