WHM or SCH - Which is easier for a newbie?

So, I started leveling to get to Scholar, and while doing Arcanist, I find I have some issues with pet control. Having a while separate hotbar to manage my pet and make sure it's not pulling is rather tedious.

My question, aside from the topic is, are Scholar's faeries easier to manage than the Carbuncle pets? I do prefer the shield + HOT style of healing, as it lets me do more off-DPS, but this damn Carbuncle keeps screwing it up. If I'm doing something wrong, I'd like to know.

Last night, the tank in the dungeon I was doing asked me to set my pet to Obey (of course I did because tank's word is law), but I'm still not quite clear on what the differences are between all the pet settings. I mean, there are 8 and they sound pretty similar when looking at them. Any help is appreciated.

WHM is easyer overall in comparison with SCH. The obey comand forse the pet to do the special actions when you told her to instead of the pet doing them.

WHM is easier since it's more straightforward. Your just worry about MP and Enmity which are mechanics that carry over from other games so they are easier to understand. SCH has to worry about Aetherflow stacks, pet control, and pet position. The fairies are probably easier to control than the attacking pets since you don't have to worry about them attacking wrong targets and junk.

As far as pet settings go there are two conflicting pairs of commands: Sic vs. Obey and Guard vs. Steady.

Sic and Obey determine what actions your pet will take in battle. With Sic they will use most skills immediately when they get off cooldown or when they deem them "appropriate". In Obey, they will use their regular auto-attack skills (or the basic heal in the Fairies' case) but will not use any other skills until you tell them to. Ideally it is important to practice Obey as soon as possible as many pet skills are much stronger and much less problematic when you use them at specific times.

To give an example, Emerald Carbuncle (and later Garuda-Egi) will be very annoying to melee DPS and tanks when not under Obey because it will regularly do its knockback move if it is near enemies. Also, at higher levels they will get a skill that will extend the duration of most of your DoT spells. Obviously it's way more beneficial to do this after all your DoTs are applied, but they will use it immediately after you put just one DoT on severely hurting your potential damage.

As far as fairies go, if not under obey Eos will blow Whispering Dawn, her AOE regen spell, when someone takes even a tiny amount of damage. Since this tends to happen right at the start of a pull she will get large amounts of hate from this and generally will make pulls a pain in the ass because of it. If you control her manually with Obey, not only will you be able to use it when it is necessary, you can also buff it up with Rouse and Eos's healing buff to turn whispering dawn into a very powerful AoE regen which can't happen if she uses it whenever she feels like it.


Guard vs. Steady just determines when your pet will initiate combat, and I believe is only applicable to attacking pets. With Guard they will attack enemies if you get aggro, whereas with Steady they will wait for you to command them to take an action before attacking something. They both have their uses but you should be fine having them in Guard pretty much all the time.

Steady and the pet won't do anything, and obey will put the pet into an auto attack only mode. (This includes your basic cure for fairies) This is the preferred method. Reason being, if they are not in obey, they will blow all their cooldowns right at the start and this is no good especially in endgame when you want to use your pets special abilities art specific times. Obey will make your pet heal by itself, but it will only use embrace and it will use it when a member drops to 80% hp I believe, and the you can manually activate her other CDs when you want

This community never ceases to amaze me. Thanks, lads and lasses!

Pets take a little work to get a handle on. Scholar for the most part is also a pre-emptive healer, and benefits immensely from the player knowing when to put a shield up.

The White Mage is more reactionary, so it's easier to get past a fight if you don't know the boss fights that well. That said, you will still be more mp-effiicent if you know the fight as a WHM; and that is useful to help squeeze out the rest of your party's dps. This is especially important at the top-tier endgame raids where dps checks and healing checks are frequently interweaved together.

I honestly don't think there's a big difference in high-end play for the classes. Scholar simply have an immediately noticeable bit of learning to control the pet. White Mages have a similar issue with mp and enmity control, but those are problems most mmo healers already have experience handling and may even consider a "feature" of the class/system.

Wow, thanks. Given this info, I feel like it'd be better to go WHM at first until I have the fights down pat, then move over to SCH. Aggro and mana management (mana-gement?) are pretty easy to grasp, so that should work a little better for me. Thank you all so much! :D

SCH can be completely clueless in lower level dungeons and instances. You can do /follow on the tank and go AFK and have no issues, but that would be wasting your learning opportunities. The WHM at low level is seriously gimped and you will find it hard to solo anything at the lower levels. It is after you get both to level 50 that you need to start worry about the mp management, regen agro, vs pet control issues.

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Originally Posted by Pterodaryl

mana management (mana-gement?)

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>_<
the pun ... it hurts...

SCH isn't all that control intensive until you get to really high ilevel contents.

This is because 1) fairies are pretty smart; and 2) summons take vastly reduced AoE damage so micro controlling them isn't that much of a requirement.

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Originally Posted by Thistledown

SCH isn't all that control intensive until you get to really high ilevel contents.

This is because 1) fairies are pretty smart; and 2) summons take vastly reduced AoE damage so micro controlling them isn't that much of a requirement.

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This so hard! The other people above prescribe to the micro-manage theory but I don't find that it's necessary most of the time.

The fairies ARE smart for one. They don't need to be told healing priority since even if they are about to die, they still heal someone else who is lower rather than themselves. Selene/Eos also keep up their rotations better than I ever could considering that fields can get pretty crazy.

I just find that I personally don't need to manage them at all. I normally solo heal everything on my sch -including second coil- and I have never controlled her further than to just "Place" her somewhere.

And just like the person above said, you don't need to worry about where you put her either. Even in a fight like Ramuh EX, you can set her down right behind Ramuh in his AOE target circle and she'll just take it like a champ. It'll barely touch her (for which I am jealous) and you are free to do as you please.

As for which is easier...
Both are easy if you understand the jobs.

Whm is a reactive healer that just takes care of business by itself. With SCH, you have tools and a partner to help out with the business. Whm in my opinion was always a little less active but more solid but SCH is just very active when you're doing things on your own.

SCH is very fun and sometimes you can Cleric Stance and do some quick DPS while your pet heals. It's not that SCH is harder or easier than WHM they just play differently. Honestly I am a meh WHM but a kickass SCH, for me SCH is easier. Go with what you like to play as and you will get better as you progress through the content.

SCH is by far the easier. You don't even have to think about what to do because the fairy will have already taken care of it. You can cast Wishpering Dawn once in a while to pretend you're being useful, but until lvl 50 dungeons you can pretty much let her do all the work. And even after that, unless you're anal about min/maxing you can just let Selen on Sic, /place her somewhere and leave her alone.