The fairy deal (thoughts about future SCH fairy possibilities, incl. a third one)

Notes:

• Suggestions in this thread are not meant to buff SCH in relation to other healers. Any changes / toolkit-enhancements are meant to go hand in hand with comparable additions to the other classes.
• All numbers in suggested skills represent only an idea of how strong I think it should be and would, of course, need well thought balancing.
• I'm healing as a SCH since T5. Most of my experience / thoughts comes from endgame (savage) raiding and with that in mind.

I'm not happy with the current player / fairy balance. Letting the fairy heal while the player himself uses most of his GCDs to deal damage is not exactly what I would expect when playing a healer. I don't oppose the idea of having to DPS in healing downtimes, since it makes thinking about how much healing is really needed necessary. But in my opinion, the fairy should just support the Scholar in his doing and not take care of them all for herself, so that you can focus on something else.

Of course there are other possibilities to rebalance this, but since I would very much like to see a third fairy some day with the three of them all being viable and having different strengths / weaknesses in different encounters, I did some thinking about Scholar - fairy interaction changes that could be realised in an upcoming addon, and would like to share these with the devs and the community.

cursive - new stuff and changes


Fairies:

Eos - Strongest Healing

• Embrace
  Cast Time: 2s
  Recast Time: 3s
  Description: Grants healing over time effect with cure potency of 50 to target for 9s. Stacks up to 3 times.
  Additional Effect: If 3 stacks of "Embrace" are present on the target, restores HP of target with a potency of 150.
  
• Whispering Dawn - same as now
• Fey Covenant - same as now
• Fey Illumination - same as now

Selene - Strongest DPS

• Punishment (replaces "Embrace")
  Cast Time: 2s
  Recast Time: 3s
  Description: Deals unaspected damage with a potency of 5 for 9s. Stacks up to 4 times.
  Additional Effect: If 4 stacks of "Punishment" are present on the target, deals unaspected damage with a potency of 20.
  
• Fey Light (replaces "Fey Wind")
  Recast Time: 60s
  Radius: 20y
  Description: Increases damage done of self and nearby party members by 3% for 30s.
  
• Silent Dawn - same as now
• Fey Caress - same as now

Helios - Strongest Support

• Disgrace
  Cast Time: 2s
  Recast Time: 3s
  Description: Increases damage taken by target by 0.5% for 9s. Decreases damage done by target by 1% for 9s. Stacks up to 3 times.
  Additional Effect: If 3 stacks of "Disgrace" are present on the target, restores MP to the Scholar with a potency of 3.
  
• Refreshing Dawn
  Recast Time: 60s
  Radius: 20y
  Description: Increases base MP and TP regen of self and nearby party members by 5% for 20s.
  Additional Effect: Increases effectiveness of non-percentage-based MP and TP refreshing effects by 20%.
  
• Fey Wings
  Recast Time: 120s
  Radius: 20y
  Description: Increases movement speed of self and nearby party members by 20% for 20s.
  
• Fey Radiance
  Recast Time: 90s
  Range: 30y
  Description: Reduces damage taken by target by 7% and delivers unaspected damage with a potency of 20 every time it suffers physical damage for 15s.
  Additional Effect: Increased Enmity.
  

Since, with my changes, all fairies would completely focus on one aspect there might be the need to add the ability to compensate their lacking support in the other aspects (or boost their native one even further). For this I would add a job-ability in the likes of this (more stances, yay):

Spiritual Bonding
Cast Time: 3s
Recast Time: 15s
Effect: Grants a continious, positive effect, depending on your currently active fairy. Does not change if you summon a different fairy, while the effect is active.
- Eos: Increases your and your fairy's healing by 10%.
- Selene: Increases your and your fairy's damage done by 10%.
- Helios: Increases your and your fairy's "attack" speed by 5%.



Some thoughts explained:

Why replace Selene's "Embrace"?
Selene should boost overall-DPS by the downside of having yourself to think more about MP management and healing. Embrace would be a far too strong healing relief.

Why making the primary casts over time and stacking like that?
First of all: Embrace would still have the effect it has now, if spammed on one target, since the HoT and direct heal would add up to the actual 300 potency / 3s.
The idea is to make the skills less flexible. You can have the effects up on a maximum of 2 targets (although the micromanagement for that would be insane, would need 2 target-locks for the fairy to really make this legit).
Burst healing should be the healer's worry.
Burst DPS should be the DPS' worry.
Burst mitigation should be the tank's worry.
Therefore those benefits should only be applicable over a certain amount of time to not take away the responsibility from where it should be.

Why adding MP / TP - regen to the Scholars toolkit, are you insane?
This might really be a bit too over the top.
The additional effect of Disgrace is meant to make Energy Drain less important, so that you're not dependant on it to hit and you might use your Aetherflows differently.
Refreshing Dawn is not meant to completely replace an ASTs Spire / Ewer or a MP / TP-Song, but to hopefully reduce the need / uptime of them, so that especially BRDs and MCHs might have less damage penalty uptime.
Targets for this effect are mainly Shroud, LA, Goad, Spire / Ewer, MP- / TP-Songs and Invigorate.

Fey Radiance
Additional enmity helptool for tanks, especially when building initial enmity on groups or after target swaps. Also decent damage push (fairly high one for larger groups).


As I said all the numbers would have to be tweaked, but these are some general ideas of Scholar progression I would kinda like in future patches / addons.
And of course there are lots and lots of other stuff they could do.

So, what do you think?

"What do we think"
Not this shit again

Took a bit to find them on mobile, but here you go:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/f...threads/196805
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/f...threads/202226
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/f...threads/204316
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/f...threads/212432

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Lyrica_Ashtine

Took a bit to find them on mobile, but here you go:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/f...threads/196805
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/f...threads/202226
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/f...threads/204316
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/f...threads/212432

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I guess your phone is shitty like mine when it comes to this site because all those links lead to the main page.

Anyway, I give the OP, E for effort and actually taking the time to format it like that.

Lore-reasons prohibit a third fairy (weak, I know, but SE have cited lore as a reason for their Egi designs before, so...). You don't get 'two' fairies as a SCH, you get one (Lily) with two aspects to their personality that you bring forth at will (i.e. Eos and Selene). Mechanically, the support aspect of a third fairy could just be distributed across the existing two instead. Personally instead of a third fairy, I'd like the encouragement to switch between them mid-battle without MP cost. Was hoping Dissipation would be this, but oh well.

As for limiting the reliance on the fairy when not healing, a simple solution could be to make Cleric Stance nerf the potency of Embrace and other pet skills.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Lyrica_Ashtine

"What do we think"
Not this shit again

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As this seems to be your standard post in all of the threads you linked, I guess you didn't read what I wrote and / or didn't think about it.

1st of all its not only a "give us a new fairy!"-, but also a "rebalance the player / fairy weight"-thread, combined with a rather well-thought concept, in comparison to any of the threads you just linked.

If we let Helios aside, even the change with Embrace / Punishment and Spiritual Bonding would have a rather large impact, since Selene would completely loose the ability to heal, while the DPS you gain as a Scholar through Eos taking over much of the healing, should (numbers would have to be tweaked accordingly) not be as much as you gain from Selene.

So if you want to deal max DPS you would have to always be ready to switch back to healing, but you would do more damage when actually healing.
On the other side Eos would boost your healing greatly and still allow for you to focus on DPS with the actual fairy heal-output (on the tank at least), but it will just be less DPS than with Selene.

So thinking "Not this shit again" is, in my oppinion, a bit narrow-minded in this case, because... Well... It's not really the same shit

Quote:

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Originally Posted by FeliAiko

Lore-reasons prohibit a third fairy (weak, I know, but SE have cited lore as a reason for their Egi designs before, so...). You don't get 'two' fairies as a SCH, you get one (Lily) with two aspects to their personality that you bring forth at will (i.e. Eos and Selene). Mechanically, the support aspect of a third fairy could just be distributed across the existing two instead. Personally instead of a third fairy, I'd like the encouragement to switch between them mid-battle without MP cost. Was hoping Dissipation would be this, but oh well.

As for limiting the reliance on the fairy when not healing, a simple solution could be to make Cleric Stance nerf the potency of Embrace and other pet skills.

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Who said a new fairy would have to have something to do with the old one. Basically the same class can summon carbuncle(s), egis and a fairy. Heck if it's not a fairy, just take Alphinaud's red carbuncle... Lore can always be written accordingly, if they would want to do so.

edit: oops, sry for double post

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Midaja

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I've read some of it, including the "ideas" where the third fairy is incredibly overpowered as what other jobs have to offer in similar aspects.

If adding more power to the combination as a whole is your idea of "rebalance", you really need to consider the other jobs too.

Scholars are already pretty mandatory for the more serious content. Not because of their DPS capacity, but for their toolkit in general. Thinking scholars are only there to off dps and not heal at all is a common misconception created by the masses, much like how gossip gets twisted and shaped till it's a lie from person to person.

So let's assume your "ideas" were to be implemented and Scholars became signifcantly more overpowered compared to other jobs. We'd get a similar scenario with the tank trinity:
Warriors are so well shaped for the endgame meta, running two warriors is better than a mix of any job. Scholars would be pretty much that for the healers.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Lyrica_Ashtine

I've read some of it

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Well, then you obviously didn't read it well.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Midaja

Notes:

• Suggestions in this thread are not meant to buff SCH in relation to other healers. Any changes / toolkit-enhancements are meant to go hand in hand with comparable additions to the other classes.

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Apart from that I'd really like you to show some examples in where those skills should be overpowered in comparison with other classes / the other fairies. Apart from that:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Midaja

Notes:

• All numbers in suggested skills represent an idea of how strong I think it should be and would, of course, need well thought balancing.

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I don't think we need a third fairy but I would love an Enkindle like ability that made them do something cool. Maybe it could push Selene into dps mode for example (e.g., turn Embrace into Punishment) but since it's a cd and limited duration (something I wish Cleric Stance was...), it wouldn't fundamentally change how we use the fairies. No clue what it would do to Eos...maybe just turn her into a white mage complete with peppermint robes :)

Side note: WTB barding for our fairies. I want to dress them up.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Midaja

Who said a new fairy would have to have something to do with the old one. Basically the same class can summon carbuncle(s), egis and a fairy. Heck if it's not a fairy, just take Alphinaud's red carbuncle...

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Lore-wise ACNs can only summon Carbuncles (which aren't unique, just some geometric magic construct any standard ACN can summon). Lore-wise you simply inherited a fairy that once belonged to someone else. Different cases here.

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Lore can always be written accordingly, if they would want to do so.

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Yes, and SE have shown that they're not willing to rewrite existing/established lore 'just because'. If something as minor as Egi design won't be changed because of lore then an additional fairy is even more unlikely.

The future of SCHs should be focused on reducing the stranglehold they have on the healer spot. Right now its practically mandatory to have them in groups, and your ideas would only reinforce that concept.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Midaja

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There's already one fairy that can reliably increase the group-wide damage by 1.5%. The fairy you suggested can reliably increase raid-wide damage by 1.5% as well. Not only that, but also 3% mitigation. If you were to bring two scholars instead, both of these fairies would increase the group's damage by 3% - Let's forget about the multiplicative value for now. Not even an Astrologian can pull that off by pulling balances back to back with every draw. One fairy also has a resource stapler for the entire group. But the biggest one for the scholar themself - Not like Scholars already have the best resource tool among the healers anyway. If this "idea" was meant to make Energy Drain less important, where is the nerf idea for Energy Drain? As it is, especially for endgamers, they'll just use both. It's not a case of "choose this or that" with this idea, it's both.

The 3.0 abilities Scholars have gotten covered pretty much the very area they were weak in: AoE healing. In a sense, Scholars can already take over the White Mage's role as "main healer". The only drawback about this would be that it's not very resource efficient compared to White Mage. But with some extra resources available from a particular fairy and a permanent 3% mitigation, white mages will get pointed the door as well in favor for having the two fairies present. Simply due to how the content is designed: DPS is all that matters in the end.

So if they get tweaked down to an extend where they don't overpower the other healing jobs, why even have these? If the effects of the fairies are too underwhelming in the end for sake of not overpowering the other jobs, they're not appealing. Removing Embrace entirely would only make it harder for the other healer while you're doing damage.

These changes won't make it easier for other healing job, just makes the Scholar seem more valuable than it already is. If the numbers aren't appealing enough, all that will change is that Selene is being removed from the endgame throne and Eos takes over. After all; Selene can't help heal any more and the scholar will have to compensate.

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Originally Posted by Lyrica_Ashtine

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If the capability for dps-boosting would be all that matters, every group would be using AST / SCH or SCH / SCH already. Why are they not doing it? Cause shields don't stack and WHM still has its own benefits (MND-buff for example...).
As I said, numbers can be tweaked and also damage taken increased on one enemy is still something entirely different then damage done increased on all players. In A2S for example the first one is much inferior to the other.

There is no Energy Drain nerf because this is about fairy changes. If SE (the only ones who really know the math) would implement it, they should of course have those things in mind. And they do, as they have shown by the pre-release balance-card nerf.
Also you don't know what skills might come, where you want to spend your Aetherflows for, so it might get a "choose this or that".

If you say removing embrace would only make it harde for the other healer... Well, broil deals less damage than Stone III, so I'd rather take the healing duty, once my DoTs are up and let the WHM DPS then the other way around...

As long as DPS is the most crucial aspect of encounter designs, Selene will not disappear from endgame, even if she can't heal anymore. At least as long as she increases DPS more than Eos does, which is a must in my scenario.
Yes, the Scholar will have to compensate, but having Selene out should still do most damage.
Although in some fights Helios might be more of a DPS-increase because of the enhanced raid-wide MP- / TP-management & Radiance.
And thats what the point would be - all fairies would still be viable. Sometimes on par, letting the Scholar choose what fits their playstile, sometimes one might be stronger than the other.

I'm not really going to go into the abilities too much because lore quite clearly prevents a third fairy anyway. Each SCH soul stone holds a single fairy in which they contain the knowledge of their previous masters. Hence Eos and Selene are two aspects of one fairy 'Lily'. I don't think it's necessary to change the lore so much as to allow Lily to now turn into a male fairy too. It just gets messy, and we're not SMNs. (Even they didn't get more egis!)

I like that you don't like the way things work at the moment in regards to healing though. DPS checks being the main feature of any raid is quite one dimensional. But to solve this I would rather change the content than the classes. It would be nice if SE could create fights where tanks and healers need to undertake specific roles as opposed to dealing more DPS.

Edit: Also your comment about Stone 3 being stronger almost makes me wonder if you're contradicting yourself slightly. From the OP, your general idea was to change things in order to make Scholars more healing oriented, yet it seems like you would be fine with WHMs taking the DPS role because their Stone 3 does more damage. As healers in general we should be asking for more challenging content that involves tactics for healing to keep us more occupied. If you just want to be healing mainly, go level AST? xD

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Originally Posted by Midaja

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There's a reason why White Mages/astrologians are constantly in the main healer seat while the Scholar's are contributing damage: MP efficiency. Scholar's healing kit is very costly in comparison with the other healers. Even Lustrate's not as cost efficient compared to the potency-tied spells like Cure II and Benefic II. One Aetherflow stack spend on Energy Drain is 884 MP. When used on Lustrate that's 884 MP you won't get in your pocket. In contrast, Scholar's damage kit is more MP efficient. In particular compared to White Mage. There's also the thing where Scholars have three DoTs that cannot miss and neither can Bane. Accuracy will always be the bane for endgame White Mages.

MP cost aside, it's not even a case of shield stacking or not. Two capable scholars will make it work because one of them will be in Cleric's Stance for most of the time, making one scholar solo heal for most of it like what White Mages and Astrologians are doing with the current meta. It's even less of a case when both tanks are taking damage. A White Mage+Astrologian combo will never outperform in either healing or damage aspect compared to either + Scholar. Not only does it take more effort, but also far more resources. There's only one reason why bringing a scholar would make healing not only easier, but also more resource efficient: The fairy aid with Embraces. If you take that away from Selene, the Scholar will need to help out more or the other healer will have to spend more resources on healing as that free 300-500 HPS is suddenly gone. This will pretty much erase Selene from endgame existence. Eos right now at least serves as a pick for those still progressing on certain content.

Even if you wish for a "balance" of fairies, that will never happen. You even mentioned it yourself that "Selene should still do the most damage". If this is the case, Selene will be the number 1 pick as long DPS is the only thing that matters. If Helios would make enough difference resource-wide, it'll steal away a raid slot for bards and machinists in favor for another melee or caster, depending on content. This of course would mean an even bigger DPS increase, but also shows how overpowered such a fairy would be as it can completely nullify the USP of a bard, machinist and ninja; supportive DPS - Yes, even Ninja's. If it cannot do this at least, groups will still bring bards/machinists as a resource battery and Selene will be picked over "Helios". Even more so how nearly all endgame encounters has more than one target at times. Unless you're implying "Helios" should be able to apply that vulnerability debuff on all targets in range.

Lastly, choice is but an illusion. Especially for endgamers.

Any additional fairies would require change in lore. Scholars only can summon one fairy that they make a bond with, in our case its Lily. Eos is the dawn aspect of Lily and selene the dusk.

For the SCH LB3, we summon Lily whole and its awesome.

Why the hell would you make the only fairy able to heal Eos? That's a retarded idea even as someone that doesn't main Scholar. The reason Scholar can even dps so much is because the fairy is pushing out constant healing with embrace.

I really like these ideas, something to make game play more interesting.