A question for SCH mains and enjoyers

Hello friends, to preface I’m a pretty casual SCH, I like to play it from to time and I enjoy the aesthetic. My question to everyone is how do you guys feel about the Fairy Gauge? To me it feels strange that Aetherpact is the spell that uses it. To me Aetherpact feels like it should use a stack of Aether Flow and last 10 sec, if anything I would change Aether Flow from 3 to 5 stacks and call that the Fairy Gauge. Maybe there’s some hidden SCH tech or something, but that’s just how I feel about it though. I would love to hear all of your opinions :)

I can't say this topic is targeted at me because I have not legitimately played Scholar since its death when Stormblood ended, but it was my first job, and one of two jobs I played exclusively throughout ARR and the first two expansions, and I've kept well aware of the changes its suffered from the this expansion and the last.

The Fey Gauge is arbitrary. Hide it from your UI and nothing changes. There's no element of gameplay where the player actively aims to generate gauge nor decisions to make on how to spend it, and Aetherpact is a mid healing cooldown anyway.

What Scholar needs come 7.0 is at least a soft rework. Both Aetherflow and the Fey Gauge should be reevaluated to give each a clear purpose. As you said, you could very simply just kill the Fey Gauge completely and make Aetherpact cost Aetherflow instead and virtually nothing changes about the Scholar gameplay experience. Meanwhile Aetherflow continues to be in a weird position where the existence of Energy Drain creates a conflict of interest in how you use Aetherflow while simultaneously being the single modicum of choice Scholar is allowed to engage with, and thus removing Energy Drain doesn't feel good either. In addition to redesigning the gauges, Scholar also needs to stop having all of these internal caveats that disable your faerie.

What I've said before and continue to stand by is reworking Aetherflow to being an offensive resource and restore the more tactical offensive gameplay identity the job was born with. Meanwhile, the Fey Gauge should be your primary resource for healing tools, and in particular, make these tools more about your faerie. The Scholar is a DPS--an Arcanist who became a healer through the help of their faerie companion. The two of you are a team. The Scholar uses attack spells to generate aether in the form of the Fey Gauge that the faerie can then use to provide healing and utility to the team.

It's EXTREMELY pointless and boring.

In ShB, you had a choice between a single target and an AOE, but the AOE had a CD (and was also pretty weak), so it was seldom really a choice - you tended to use the AOE on CD as part of your healing plan anyway, because the alternative, Aetherpact, is a CHANNELED spell that prevents other abilities being used and isn't that powerful. Channeled spells, in general, are not good unless they're big gamechangers to justify not being able to do anything else. And while Aetherpact only locks down Eos and not the SCH player themselves, it still carries the drawbacks of being a relatively slow, relatively minor heal.

I once proposed having Energy Drain cost Faerie Gauge instead of Aetherflow, since that would at least give it a purpose which it doesn't really have right now, as well as making Aetherpact an instant cast Lustrate or something (to make the Energy Drain vs Lustrate an actual choice).

I'm not sure what the ultimate solution is, but Faerie Gauge as it exists right now is borderline pointless. I RARELY see people actually use Aetherpact, and most of the uses are either high optimization that's borderline irrelevant or people (myself included) being tryhards trying to figure out ways to use it when there really aren't any/when other abilities are far better for the task. Like a single Excogitation. Or even Lustrate. Or even Adlo. Or sometimes even Physic. It's that bad. At this point, it could be removed and Aetherpact just turned into a 60 sec oGCD with two charges that lasts for 9/12 seconds and nothing of value would be lost. I've gone through entire fights at 100 gauge and just forgot to use it because there was never a time for it to be useful and it was completely unnecessary.

You know, a poll that would actually hold a lot of value for the design team would be to ask the question: "What aspect(s) of Scholar's identity appeals to you the most? What is your interpretation of Scholar's job fantasy?"

If they could gather information from the general playerbase on a question like that, it could greatly help them identity what to do with Scholar and where to take the job. What are the most interesting aspects of the jobs identity that the general playerbase are interested in? DoTs? The faerie? Abilities like Chain Stratagem or Deployment Tactics? Barriers? Knowing information like that would give them direction and allow them to adjust the job in a way that enhances those elements.

I’d honestly be fine if aetherpact was basically just replaced with SCH soteria that is obtained at a way lower level like soteria itself is, I mean aetherpact is technically stronger on the front of what aetherpact attempts to do but it really isn’t a large enough distinction for anyone to care

I also agree with the idea that healing should be moved to the fairy gauge and give the aetherflow to damage and utility skills (think of how much more interesting you could make SCH overnight by reintroducing shadowflare that cost an aetherflow and competed with SS that cost 20 fey gauge or something of that measure

I don’t actually think that SCH’s unique position of having skills that lock each other out of other skills should be removed (but damn please fix seraph ghosting actions near the end or it’s duration, I know it used to be worse but it’s still bad) but they could prune and refine some old skills you have to stack to get their desired effects, like for example 99.99% of the time dissipation, illumination and protraction are just stacked together to function as a fat spreadlo buff, they are rarely used for their individual functions, organisation of those skills could help a lot here

So like for example say we merged illumination into dissipation, deleted protraction and changed fey blessing to 45 seconds. That opens 2 slots on SCH’s hotbar (or three if you argue physick is totally useless which it is but I’ll ignore it for now), now change aetherflow to generate 3 stacks of aetherflow that affect the following skills- expedient, shadowflare (share CD with SS), dissipation/illumination and energy drain, every time you use an aetherflow skill you generate 20 fairy gauge; then the current aetherflow skills SS, excog, indom and lustrate become fairy bar skills, aetherpact becomes a version of current soteria

So now energy drain becomes a choice of sacrificing utility rather than healing, an extra DOT is readded giving SCH some of its old identity back and if you wanted to fill the one other skill removed you could add an 18 second DOT, that gives SCH 5 damage skills to play with, none of which directly cost damage (but require tactics to maximise damage without giving up healing), SCH’s glut of skills that need to be stacked on top of each other to achieve simple tasks is reduced, the fairy gauge no longer feels like a waste and you could even rename aetherflow to the Selene gauge and the fairy gauge to the eos gauge evoking what the original fairies use to do

Conceptually, I love it. Ordering the pet to focus heal someone while I tend to other things is clever job design. Remembering to cancel the tether to conserve gauge when it's not needed or re-apply it after using another pet skill makes me feel smart. It's like a very small hit of actually being the battlefield tactician that was sold to us in the job lore. I know about the manual Embrace targeting in ARR/HW and this seems like an okay refinement of that system... less control overall in exchange for not having to bonk an Embrace macro after every cast during hectic action.

Practically? It's piss-weak and sucks. It barely heals for more than Embrace, and to charge gauge optimally you have to deal with extremely annoying drawbacks like not spending Dissipation's aetherflow charges until the fairy returns, which is almost always not worth it since it entails not dumping E.Drains during a burst window or delaying the use of your regular Aetherflow.

If Fey Union healed for more, if Fey Blessing were back on the gauge, and if the gauge awarded 150% for dumping during Dissipation instead of nothing, it would make a much more satisfying gameplay loop. Burst window goes off, you spend 6 charges under the Dissipation buff and get rewarded with 90 gauge instead of a big fat 0, then the fairy comes back and you pop off with powerful fairy gauge heals to quickly bring everyone back to safety before more damage goes out.

Instead, you don't get to choose when to Dissipate at all, because you need its laughable +healing buff to make giant Spreadlos for the un-fun 'kitchen sink mitigate or wipe' mechs they keep adding to force the DPS to press AddleFeint. It's all just ass-backwards from what actual fun healing design should be.

The fairy gauge can feel rather pointless because it only interacts with one single ability. However, I wouldn't call Fey Union useless. It has its uses in savage and ultimate on the long strings of autoattacks that the bosses do in between mechanics, average tanks don't tend to mitigate autos so the constant HoT has a use there.

As for the fairy gauge, the easiest way they can fix how pointless it is is to return Fey Blessing to the fairy gauge but turn it into an AoE heal pulse that consumes gauge per pulse, like Fey Union but AoE, so there's at least another use for the gauge.

As a surprise to no one, I don't really like Aetherflow = damage, Faerie gauge = healing, especially if you only get the latter from the former. In general, I oppose the idea of "damage leads to healing" since that means "when you can't do damage, you're locked out of healing", which is bad. The only exception I make is if you do something like a RIFT Chloromancer who's entirely built from the ground up to heal that way. Doing it with SCH now wouldn't just require a rework, but a complete rework and shifting entirely how the Job works and is designed in focus and philosophy.

I'm kind of with Vetch that I love the concept of stuff like Aetherflow, but they're so weak as to be irrelevant.

...which is REALLY odd considering how ridiculously OP our heals in general are that this high level once endcap ability that requires channeling and a resource and locks Eos out of using other abilities, that of all abilities, it wasn't made OP for whatever reason.

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Supersnow - one proposal I made (for freeing up a button or two) was combining Fey Blessing with Whispering Dawn. Basically make it a poor man's Medica 2 on a 1 min CD. I've also seen people suggest making Physic upgrade into Leeches+ (Esuna + Cure; for all 4 Healers, actually)

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Originally Posted by Renathras

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In a situation like this there would be no situation where you couldn’t use the healing half if the damage came first, it’s basically just an expanded form of kardia, nobody argues soteria is useless because if you can’t do damage you can’t use soteria, not every heal should be useful in every situation and SCH is already the healer that exemplifies that the most, we really don’t need a healer equivalent of WAR

As for combining WD with FB I wouldn’t be opposed to it though those are skills I will often use separately, it’s been very long since I use fey illumination for any other reason than combining it with dissipation for a spreadlo buff

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Renathras

As a surprise to no one, I don't really like Aetherflow = damage, Faerie gauge = healing, especially if you only get the latter from the former. In general, I oppose the idea of "damage leads to healing" since that means "when you can't do damage, you're locked out of healing", which is bad. The only exception I make is if you do something like a RIFT Chloromancer who's entirely built from the ground up to heal that way. Doing it with SCH now wouldn't just require a rework, but a complete rework and shifting entirely how the Job works and is designed in focus and philosophy.

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Why is that a bad thing?

What is the context of not being able to use damage abilities? You’re talking about a phase change, in which case you also cannot cast offensive spells either. So why do you even need additional healing cooldowns when there’s no penalty for casting GCD heals? That’s the one time to go hard on Adloquium and Succor, and take advantage of Emergency Tactics if necessary.

Also, sometimes a major rework is necessary, particularly when an entire role is suffering an unsustainable, terrible design philosophy.