Scholar techniques

If you play the scholar and discover something technically useful please share!

Some interesting finds from me:

If you use an instant skill (aetherflow, sprint, lustrate, swiftcast, cleric stance) while you are casting a spell the instant skill will activate immediately after your cast is finished so you don't need to spam press the button.

If you want to use rouse + whispering dawn while casting a gcd spell like succor:
Press succor, (50% cast) whispering dawn, (anytime after WD, during succor) rouse (in that order).
This allows you to spread the keypresses over the cast of succor rather than towards the end. The WD will have the rouse effect provided you use it at 50% cast.

If you are in cleric stance and want to weave lustrates in between gcd casts like Bio II, Miasma:
Bio II(lustrate) -> miasma vs. Bio II -> lustrate -> miasma
This way you don't have to press lustrate once bio II finishes, it will automatically do it for you so you only have to press miasma as soon as bio II has finished casting.

The deactivation of cleric stance does not have the short delay that many instant cast skills do. You can use this (and the previous find) to create some interesting combos:

(in cleric stance): ruin (cleric stance) -> lustrate vs. ruin -> cleric stance -> lustrate
result: ruin -> cleric stance OFF & lustrate together
this is slightly better than deactivating cleric stance after ruin goes out and then using lustrate because you don't have to press two buttons in quick succession which is not as optimal.

Spell casts will still complete even if you are interrupted at approximately 80%-90% cast. This allows you to move slightly before you complete your cast.

You can use this trick on the last boss of the lost city of amdapor: you can begin casting leeches when nightmare's cast is finished, and the sleep will be removed. (This works if you leeches any target that is not you: pet, party member - I don't know why it doesn't work for yourself)

This also works in thornmarch extreme when you are about to lose control of your character. You can time the cast of leeches so that you will lose control at 80% cast, then leeches will remove your own debuff. If you take this into account, healers can now stand near the paladin moogle with no fear of wipes.

Fey Illumination increases your healing output, not healing received. This means only you, other healers, and your pet needs the buff. If your target (tank) has the buff, but you don't, your heals will not be increased on that target.

Sometimes you want to heal a non-party member (e.g. alliance) who cannot receive the fey illumination buff, but that is okay because only you need the buff.

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Originally Posted by Lovemonster

If you use an instant skill (aetherflow, sprint, lustrate, swiftcast, cleric stance) while you are casting a spell the instant skill will activate immediately after your cast is finished so you don't need to spam press the button.
[...] The WD will have the rouse effect provided you use it at 50% cast.

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This is true and pretty useful. However, as far as the WD goes, I don't know if you are using 50% as an arbitrary easy reference-point or not, but it's good enough if the buff is applied at literally the last possible instant for the game to register it being up there, even if the cast is nearly going out. But mayhaps 50% is a good reference point for this, so yes.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Lovemonster

The deactivation of cleric stance does not have the short delay that many instant cast skills do. You can use this (and the previous find) to create some interesting combos:

(in cleric stance): ruin (cleric stance) -> lustrate vs. ruin -> cleric stance -> lustrate
result: ruin -> cleric stance OFF & lustrate together
this is slightly better than deactivating cleric stance after ruin goes out and then using lustrate because you don't have to press two buttons in quick succession which is not as optimal.

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What you say is true, but it is mostly useful intel for those people with a case of "chubby fingers" where they double-tap Cleric Stance, de-activating and then re-activating it, instead of having a feel for it going off the instant your cast has ended.

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Originally Posted by Lovemonster

Spell casts will still complete even if you are interrupted at approximately 80%-90% cast. This allows you to move slightly before you complete your cast.

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This is incredibly elementary knowledge. (Not to diss you or anything). One just needs to be careful they don't do this too haphazardly, because it is also possible to have the cast visibly go out with its animation finishing, but no effect going out. It's all in the finetuning though, and this technique should indeed be used.

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Originally Posted by Lovemonster

Fey Illumination increases your healing output, not healing received.

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This is true. You can test it easily by casting Fey Illumination solo, then casting heals on random people in the vicinity - you will notice you're healing 20% more. Good information to know if thinking of Eos placement for optimal ranges - trivializes that part a bit, somewhat. Still, good points and thread. :)

As for myself, I can't really think of any "techniques" right off the bat, but I'll add a soloing-questing tip, mainly for dailies:

Use your fairy as your tank, if you are doing some tedious dailies wherein you get monster spawns/random mob aggro, when you have to interact with things.

Easily achieved by having your fairy manually cast a heal on you (use a manual Embrace keybind) and without you doing anything - this will then make your fairy rip off hate off you, gravitating the enemies towards her. Open-world trash is weak enough that you can even have 5+ of them gang up on your fairy and she will be able to survive Embracing herself. One should preferrably place her a bit further away, as some mobs have AOE-cones that will then interrupt your interaction again.

This saves you a lot of time in the long run, as opposed to disposing of the mobs. Will edit as I remember things worthwhile a post.

Edit:

Another quickie for those potential fairy-swaps:

Using a fairy's cooldowns and then fairy-swapping (Eos←→Selene) will make it so that the cooldown duration is adjusted to be the same as the previous fairy's skill used.

This might seem like common sense to some and less so for the others. However, what this basically means is that, in your normal pet hotbar-layout, the three buttons to the right of Embrace both are activated from the respective fairy's hotbar with the activation of either. So basically, the "pairs" are:

Whispering Dawn & Silent Dusk
Fey Covenant & Fey Glow
Fey Illumination & Fey Light

If you have Eos out and use Whispering Dawn (60s CD), then instantly swap to Selene, it will then have Silent Dusk on a 50s+ CD, even if Silent Dusk is normally on a 40s CD.
If you have Eos out and use Fey Illumination (120s CD), then instantly swap to Selene, you will find out that your Fey Light will have 110s+ left until it is back up, even if it is normally on a 60s CD.
If you have Selene out and use Fey Glow (60s CD), then instantly swap to Eos, you will find that your Fey Covenant will only have 50s+ left until it is usable again (being on a 120s CD normally).

Point being - be careful with how you use your fairy-CDs if you plan on fairy-swapping. Not many people fairy-swap mid-combat, but for those of you that do or plan on doing - keep this in mind. It's not really that important, because if anything, people usually swap in the order of Selene→Eos, hence the 120s CD Eos-cooldowns will be available after a shorter time of inactivity due to Selene's CDs being shorter. In reverse, though, it can have more impact. Just closest to what I could immediately think of for this thread.

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Originally Posted by Tranquil

This is incredibly elementary knowledge.

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I want to live on your planet where BLMs don't whine about having to move and stand there for 5 minutes after their cast completes.

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Originally Posted by SeraviEdalborez

I want to live on your planet where BLMs don't whine about having to move and stand there for 5 minutes after their cast completes.

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Heh. :)

Well, obviously not everyone knows about it, but most people will have/should have found about it intuitively along the way. And because this thread was about SCH-techniques and that tip is universal and not SCH-specific; I thought it was elementary in comparison to the other pieces of info the OP dropped. x)

But yes, you do see that thing you mentioned as well!

The issue with using movement while casting is closer to an exploit of the lag (in much the same way as how THM could switch between fire and ice and have a free cast before the nerf). It's a useful trick, especially for Titan and other movement-intensive fights. It's just a matter of practice to find the precise timing needed. Keep in mind that practice is very difficult as the exact time is affected by server load and whether you are playing on the open world or the faster primal/coil instance servers (latter check positioning every .3 seconds instead of .5 or something like that).

Anyway, this isn't really a technique but when applying DOTs, be aware that it takes some time for the effect to register after the icon appears. Using Bane too soon after a DOT can sometimes result in that DOT not being included. This is again a timing issue to optimize dps, but it comes up frequently enough that some arcanists wonder why BIO doesn't transfer or only sometimes transfers.

Some of the most annoying debuff stacks (like ADS vulnerability debuff in coil t2 or Twintania's' death sentence enfeeblement) are only applied after damage is dealt to the tank. A sufficiently strong adloquium+stoneskin can prevent these debuffs from being applied or give tanks enough time to allow them to fall off, effectively removing the need for tank swapping. Keep in mind that enemy attacks will first eat the galvanize barrier, followed by stoneskin when applying your shields to maximum effect. Variations on this key technique are used often to solo-tank.

One tip that I like to recommend, is to use Fey Illumination with every other whispering dawn, but don't use it right away.

I use Fey Illumination, cast succor, maybe twice if there is alot of AoE damage goes out (once the first one has been consumed), and when there is 5-10s left on Illumination, I hit rouse and whispering dawn for a super-regen from eos. This gives me a few seconds of boosted aoe healing, followed by 21s of awesome eos aoe healing, rather than having both occur at the same time. This lets you cover a longer periord of time (30s or so) depending on timing.

Forcing eos to heal allows you to get alot more healing out of her, as she can pre-heal, so I like to macro her skills in with mine.
My heal macros include an autoface toggle, mouseover targeting for both eos and I, and a focus target override embrace.

The autoface toggle is so I don't kill people in T7 while healing, but still letting me use auto-face to dps when I can.
The mouseover healing lets me keep the boss targeted for easy energy drains and dots when I can.
The focus override lets me focus the offtank in levithan so eos heals them every time I cast a heal (without getting stacks)

/macroicon "Adloquium"
/pac "Embrace" <f>
/pac "Embrace" <mo>
/autofacetarget off
/ac "Adloquium" <mo>
/autofacetarget on

for pet abilities, use <pet> instead of <mo>, like so:
/macroicon "Rouse"
/autofacetarget off
/ac "Rouse" <pet>
/autofacetarget on

(similar macros can be created for Sustain, stoneskin, lustrate, eye for an eye, leeches, physick)

As most summoners know, but many scholars don't, if you use cooldowns before applying dots to a target, then the cooldowns wear off, and you then use bane, the dot gets shared with the higher damage. This is also true with Cleric Stance. You can turn on cleric stance, apply dots/shadow flare, turn off cleric stance to heal, and pop Bane off GCD, and it will dot up nearby mobs as if you still had cleric stance active.

I would just like to point out that Lustrate is NOT AFFECTED by Cleric Stance. It heals for 25% of your targets HP and is not at all affected by your healing potency.