SCH 4.2 Disappointment

First off, I'm very happy that Excog won't be a complete waste if the target doesn't fall below 50% moving forward. However, when they mentioned QoL changes for SCH, the first thing that came to my mind was Dissipation. I was really hoping that they gave Dissipation the Bahamut Treatment, i.e pet is automatically summoned back after the effect ends.

Am I the only one that feels this way?

Probably not the only one, but that's really more of a buff than QoL. Dissipation already has situations it's useful in. I was more hoping for a Selene rework, because at the moment she's... pretty much useless.

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Originally Posted by Riyshn

Probably not the only one, but that's really more of a buff than QoL. Dissipation already has situations it's useful in. I was more hoping for a Selene rework, because at the moment she's... pretty much useless.

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Completely agree with regard to the Selene re-work, but I don't expect anything to change with Selene in the near future.

yes to both please

Theory is that at the point we are now, buffing/modifying Selene could throw off the balance of healers. We want Selene to be more useful, but we don't want to see Selene/Selene or Selene/Eos SCH pairs pushing out WHM and AST from content because "meta."

Selene is like a badge of honor you pull out to prove you're a great over geared Scholar. I wish she wasn't such a liability but a real option instead with equal benefit to Eos

I don’t know. If selene was buffed, to the point of prefering her over EOS, scholar would be over powered. This is because you would gain the flexibilty of swapping between the two as needed. The only balanced way to make selene good is to also nerf eos. I would rather have a useless selene than a nerfed EOS.

I would like them more balanced and an actual choice because it would make the class more fun. However, nerfing EOS would mess with the core healing kit and also raise the skill disparity (by having to “fairy stance dance” to optimize fully). I don’t see this happening until the next expansion.

But is Selene truly useless or is this a case where '"everybody knows Selene isn't good" so they don't use her? In other words, is it a self-fulfilling prophecy?

:confused:

I don't want them touching Scholar too much. They could end up giving us the summoner (nerf) or warrior (simplying too much) treatment.

I'm fine with dissipation, though I wouldn't mind if it would automatically resummon the same pet once its effect wears off.
As far as Selene goes, if they could just make Silence Dusk an oGCD for her, so it doesn't matter if she was just casting something, then I'm good. It already has cooldown so it's not like it'll be abused, and having it not be affected by her doing other skills is the only way it'll be consistently useful.

I do use her for easier content for the DPS buff, and I've tried to use her for hunts to silence Mirka but she's unreliable and often does it too late. Fix her lateness and I'll love her.

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Originally Posted by Kacho_Nacho

But is Selene truly useless or is this a case where '"everybody knows Selene isn't good" so they don't use her? In other words, is it a self-fulfilling prophecy?

:confused:

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More that Selene is very situational verses Eos just bringing you more raw healing power. Eos is always good, and I dare say much easier to micro inspite of the weird pet AI delays.

Yet, Selene's AOE cleanse and haste is a Godsend in fights like Odin's trial. So, Selene's not useless, just that Eos performs better in 99.9% of content.

I would absolutely swap to Selene full time if I could, but Silent Dusk is like a lost skill.

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Originally Posted by Squintina

I don't want them touching Scholar too much. They could end up giving us the summoner (nerf) or warrior (simplying too much) treatment.

As far as Selene goes, if they could just make Silence Dusk an oGCD for her, so it doesn't matter if she was just casting something, then I'm good. It already has cooldown so it's not like it'll be abused, and having it not be affected by her doing other skills is the only way it'll be consistently useful.

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It is surprising that such a glaring flaw was not fixed in this patch since they improved all the other classes’ “silient” abilities so that they apply to their targets faster. All I can guess is that the devs forgot Selene exists. They must have removed “summon 2” from their hotbars a long time ago.

Selene is pretty reliable when the healing demand is incredibly low like in the 50/60 roulette when everyone is way over geared. I use her frequently just for fun but I have noticed that her Silence gets used with no actual effect pretty often. Im not sure if it's just late or being resisted but if she is on Sic in a boss fight you will see her try and fail to Silence all kinds of things and it's obvious she isn't busy casting Embrace if the Tank has full health. It's really weird.

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Originally Posted by NobleWinter

Selene is pretty reliable when the healing demand is incredibly low like in the 50/60 roulette when everyone is way over geared. I use her frequently just for fun but I have noticed that her Silence gets used with no actual effect pretty often. Im not sure if it's just late or being resisted but if she is on Sic in a boss fight you will see her try and fail to Silence all kinds of things and it's obvious she isn't busy casting Embrace if the Tank has full health. It's really weird.

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Neither fairy stance will cause the fairy to even start casting embrace until a party member is under 80% of their max HP (for some reason), if left to their own intelligence. To improve healing up time, you need to manually trigger the embrace spell when health is high, otherwise the fairy does nothing. Macros can help make this easier to manage. It can make a fairly significant difference if done right if you are into min/maxing.

Just to continue on the point above and run with it a little...

The trick of course is in how you macro her embraces.

Back in ARR I used to macro embrace onto my DPS abilities as was mentioned elsewhere on these boards. It felt like it worked well enough, I was doing what I thought was a good amount of damage and of course my fairy contribution was about as high as it could be. However, later on it became apparent that this was costing me quite significantly in terms of GCDs across an encounter, to the order of around 5-10%. That's a pretty significant amount over a ~10minute encounter.

As such, whilst it's very much considered wise to macro the fairy. Do spend some thought on how you handle that. I personally use my keyboard's G keys coupled with gamepad inputs to spam a key for the relevant party slot without interfering with my other keyboard entry. Another corker I've seen used was the pedals from a usb steering wheel.

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

As such, whilst it's very much considered wise to macro the fairy. Do spend some thought on how you handle that. I personally use my keyboard's G keys coupled with gamepad inputs to spam a key for the relevant party slot without interfering with my other keyboard entry. Another corker I've seen used was the pedals from a usb steering wheel.

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I agree. Never macro to your actions or your target to the fairy. Just have it be a seperate button and hardcode the target to the tank. Or one for all players if buttons are no limitation. I like the Petal idea; then you waste no hands with that maintence. Also, the steering wheel could be used to switch/cycle targets as needed (example: after tank swap).

re:OP, while dissipation is indeed awkward and personally I only ever use it for panic indoms when things are absolutely spiraling downhill, or for EDs at the end of a fight, SCH's kit is already so good that realistically buffing dissipation is sort of unnecessary. It's a button you press when everything is awful and you need atherflow to burn. It's not great, but then again SCH isn't exactly hurting for good options...

Really all they need for me to start using Selene again is to make Silent Dusk viable. Right now the utility Eos brings is simply too helpful to ignore, especially when dealing with potential pugs and in light of the Fey Wind nerf from the beginning of the patch cycle. Likewise this is the expansion where most status effects are either non-removable or are so sparse that I can't even justify keeping Selene out purely for Fey Caress either. Though in all honesty that probably has more to do with their odd insistence in turning Esuna into a Role Action instead of making it a mandatory part of every healer's kit like before. Sadly this choice in particular on top of the lack of use for a silence spell is what truly doomed Selene for me. I can justify Fey Wind to a degree, but when one skill is utterly useless and the other is barely used it becomes less of a question of 'if' so much as a question of 'why' would I ever bother outside of group content where I know and trust my co-healer.

Beyond that however I feel SCH is probably in the best spot it's ever been, and I'm fairly firmly in the camp that I don't want SE to tinker much more with it. I can practically feel the beginnings of power creep begin to settle in once more and the last thing I want is for my favorite class to be nerfed so hard into the ground that it becomes a chore to play again like in 4.0. Just fix Selene, hell even give her a physical damage reduction debuff in contrast to Eos' magical one, and it'd be perfect.

Simplest fix to Selene is to just make Silent Dusk not basically a dead ability. It'd be kinda neat if that ability was a self-SCH buff that enhances the effect of their next Aetherflow move or something. Gives a little bit of extra healing punch (or damage if you burn stacks on Energy Drain), adds a bit of synergy with Dissipation (cast buff before Dissipating Selene so you get an empowered Aetherflow ability with the extra 3 stacks), and could make Selene the better choice for more casual/4-man content (or for progression if your co-healer is up to snuff maybe).

In general though, except for the easiest of content where I value the 3% haste more than anything else, I will always choose the fairy that has 3 usable abilities over the one that pretty much only has 2 (1 in some cases since most important stuff can't be cleansed). Until that changes, I think Selene will continue to be dumpster-tier.

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Originally Posted by Riyshn

Probably not the only one, but that's really more of a buff than QoL. Dissipation already has situations it's useful in. I was more hoping for a Selene rework, because at the moment she's... pretty much useless.

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Agreed. Selene needs some work. Aside from a handful encounters, her primary attraction in party-wide cleansing isn't very useful and has managed to be completely overshadowed by Eos.

Honestly I'm more-or-less okay with Dissipation. I feel like people want it to be more lenient (e.g. fairy automatically returns to your side) because the rewards aren't particularly useful. However, I'd like to go another way around it. I think we should have to sacrifice and re-summon our fairy, but the benefits could use some tweaking. It's not bad now, honestly, but perhaps allow the 20% to affect abilities as well as spells.

Seriously with the reduced mp cost and cast time, resummoning Eos takes one GCD. I really don't see how hard this can be. If anything I'd like the healing buff duratio to be reduced to 15sec so that I can summon it back faster. If I need 3 emergency etherflow, it will be for emergency times so I'll burn through them asap. Not over 30sec. (and making skills benefit from healing buff too plz)