The 5.2 Scholar -- Thoughts from a Returning Player

Hey fam.

So I'll probably only end up reiterating what others have said, but I still want to at least voice my own opinion about the current job situation of my favourite job, Scholar, in hopes that it might matter for something.
This post is meant to provide one player's perspective regarding thoughts about Scholar as it is right now. Whether you agree/disagree, I welcome anyone to comment. I recognise that my point of view is far from infallible, and is, in the end, only my own opinion.

For context, I am a returning player who has not played for a total of four years -- since Heavensward. I decided to put education before gaming, and thus I have been away for some time. Until now. Because of the pandemic situation, I suddenly had a lot of free time on my hands. So I though: why not jump back into ffxiv for the summer? Apparently, things have changed significantly since last I played.

Back then, I was a frequent Warrior, Scholar, and Machinist player, and one of my favourite game mechanics to mess around with was the pet mechanic of the latter two. Now, this seems to have been "reworked," or, rather, removed entirely in some aspects. Selene is now just a... re-skin of Eos? What? Why?! To me, this just seems like such an odd design choice. Regardless of whether or not the majority found Selene as useful as Eos, I think just outright removing her is doing her an major injustice.
Similarly, suddenly finding myself without the majority of my dps toolkit is depressing. Part of the fun -- for me, I should emphasize -- of playing Scholar was the DoT management during our downtime. When no healing was necessary, or during easier duties (or solo duties), throwing out my DoTs, Shadow Flare, utilising Miasma II in close quarters, all the while topping if off with a satisfying Bane to spread the hurt, was sooo immensely fulfilling. I felt like I actually contributed to the party in more ways than just healing. Today, this entire toolkit seems to have just been tossed out the window and reduced to a feeble push-one-button-to-do-damage scenario, and I find it excruxiatingly dull. Overall, levelling Scholar up to 80 this summer was a pretty unenganging experience in all solo content. I admit, I enjoy the healing toolkit a ton, but having my dps toolkit forcefully ousted just makes me feel robbed.

[cont.]

From what I have gathered, there are conflicting viewpoints on how healers in this game should be played according to the developers as opposed to how healers are actually played by players. The design philosophy that "healers should only heal" -- a philosophy that, as I understand, the devs are promoting -- does not work if the content in which that philosophy is applied does not require healers to do so. As of now (and as of always?), content in ffxiv has a lot of downtime for healers. Unless the game in its entirety is reworked to accomodate this philosophy, it can only serve to further divide player and developer trust as players who play healers will feel like they are being shoehorned into a certain playstyle which the game itself does not encourage. It just does not work. Purposefully taking away healer dps tools, as if to say "you shouldn't be using these," feels like a gut-punch and just adds more fuel to the fire.

All in all, I think that there is a palpably large difference of opinion between developer and player in how this game should be played as opposed to how it works. The majority of healer players who are upset (and rightfully so, I think) understand the latter quite well. As they're actually playing the game, they know that downtime is inevitable, and so having half of your toolkit effectively removed in this manner feels akin to having an overbearing authority figure telling you how to enjoy something in a way that you know just doesn't work (because the system, at present, isn't made to accomodate a "healer should not dps" philosophy). To me, it raises the question of who this game is really for -- the developers or us, the players?

If you've read my rant so far, I thank you. Ultimately, this is just one player's mildly frustrated and disheartened observations and futile ramblings. I feel like the job I once loved has been taken away from me, stripped of everything that made it fun, kicked in the balls, neutered, and tossed back out unto the streets like a used condom Paissa, and I wish I could have back what once made it fun.

Sincerely,
A returning player

welcome back mate. Here's some advice, iif you edit your poost you can bypass word limit

Unfortunately evrything you said was completely true and whats more they actually removed energy drain from your scholar at the start of 5.0
They added it back in, begrudgingly I might add when it made scholar unplayable, and healers haven't had any gameplay changes since with the devs saying "get used to it"
The healer homogenisation and toolkit destruction has REALLY not gone down well with most people. Second only to monks

These forums full of angry healers (a 60 page quit thread and my own summary of healer issues) and a constant healer in need in duty finder or party finder. savage and ultimate isn't much better with most needing shield healers

Welcome back.

And I think you have eloquently put exactly what the issues with SCH are. You hit on the crux of the complaints really.

And you are right the game is designed to favour DPS from healers in their downtime.

And I agree SCH's healing kit is good, aside from sacrificing Selene.

And you are right if they want a healing focus, it is the content that must be adjusted not the healer DPS rotation, which is a huuuuuuge job to achieve, but something they can adjust for future content and let us keep our DPS rotations, it is not the DPS rotation that determines my DPS focus after all.

With all that said, yes there are differing opinions on what healers should be, but I argue this is the advantage of a multiple job system. Each healer can appeal to different healing philsophies and the question should never be "how should healers play?"
It should be: how should SCH play? How should WHM play? how should AST play?

JThey should have immediately backtracked because of the amount of outrage, I have no idea what they are even thinking.

I joined in Shadowbringers and was planning to main Scholar at first but quickly got bored and switched class. As a new player, it is a complete bore trying to clear MSQ solo duties with healers. They all have the same 1 dot, 1 charge, 1 aoe crap. Msq is designed to be played with dps and it's fine the healers just need their own tools to clear it.

So the developers managed to spit on both veterans and new players' faces.

The whole "get used to it" is just terrible, people pay this game's sub to have fun not to "get used" to playing a boring, poorly made/changed role.

They seem to be ignoring it because there are a lot of happy dps but it's going to hurt the game in the long run having ridiculously high waiting queues because of the lack of healers.

Sounds about right.

They removed the pet (lets be real the goal was to make the game play exactly like if it weren't handling a pet)
They removed the melee aspect of sch gameplay
They removed the dps aspect of sch
They balanced some skills really weirdly, ruin II and broil III balance is off. the entire galvanize gets used before catalyze thing.. It's just weird
They made what's left of the pet nonresponsive and clunky with plenty of bugs in the form of ability ghosting.
They haven't even mentioned SCH in live letters and patch notes for close to a year now. Since ED was added back in IIRC

For a company that has a great track record communicating and listening to it's player base it's an incredibly frustrating (almost insulting) time for healers.

The worst feeling is that SE ignore and doesn't talk about healers situation. They act like everything was allright and this point pisses me off, really.

They asked us to be patient and they have spent 2 years for "balancing" healers, they ruined all the fun and now they ignore all that mess and all those topics full of angry healers? wtf

Anyway, imo they ruined the gameplay of healers + war + drk, it's just borring as hell.

I completely feel you on this. I used to play PLD SCH and MNK back in 2.0 and when 3.0 dropped, i picked up DRK and DRG before quitting due to school. when i came back in STB (around 4.5 or so) I had to relearn how to play the majority of those jobs, but it was a completely different experience than before. I had an EXTREMELY fun time with all of those jobs, so much to the point that I made 2 separate alts JUST to have an excuse to do more dailies and relive the MSQ as different jobs. I was so excited for the changes that SHB was going to bring. excited for the story beats, the job complexity that would be added, the potential new skill ceilings to be reached...

and then I saw the butchering of my favourite jobs. I saw the neutering of the once glorious battle medic SCH, the destruction of the high octane MP management tank DRK, and the regression of the once flexible MNK. Even though PLD and DRG somehow managed to evolve, I couldn't bring myself to love them, for the price was too steep. the worst part is that I strongly believe that the emnity changes were a step in the RIGHT direction in terms of accessibility, and that a few tweaks to the jobs could have further solidified the balance they were searching for, but I couldn't get over the fact that the gameplay identities of my once beloved jobs had been all but stripped away, leaving empty husks of their former powerful yet fun selves.

I still love the story of FFXIV. it was my first FF game and I will always cherish the story, the characters, the setting, the memories i made with my friends as we played through the story, learned how to get better at our respective jobs, and even brought other friends into Eorzea over the years; however, I no longer love the gameplay, and that always haunts me when I log in to play with them.

I am one of likely a handful of SCH mains who were mostly unaffected by the ShB changes. This is due to not caring much for the previous DPS kit of SCHs in the first place. My problems with SCH and healing in general has very little to do with the pruning of their DPS skills, but will admit that SCH, having the most the lose; lost the most.

What I felt the most was the loss of our utility, the consolidation of Eos/Selene, and her abilities taken off of the pet hotbar. This dramatically changed what the SCH was capable of doing. DPS skills for healers were never an intricate and sophisticated system. I was always bored when DPSing on a healer, even during the 3.x days of SCH. There's nothing to it. You would button smash just like you do now, SCH just had a few more of those buttons to push. There was very little, if any penalty for pushing the wrong DPS skill. And by that, I mean that the overall DPS of the raid isn't punished as greatly for pushing the wrong DPS skill as a healer.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not asking for our DPS skills to work like true DPS jobs, but this also has no bearing on the fact that their DPS tools don't interact in anyway with the rest of their kit or their job gauges. An argument can be made that ED still causes damage while adding to the fairy gauge, and I would tell that person to be quite, or they will take that away too. There is also the matter that the fairy gauge, for the lack of a better term; sucks. But to be fair to SCH, I feel this way about all the healer job gauges.

What has always made SCH interesting for me was their diverse healing kit, and why it remains my go-to job for just about all content. The job is still amazing at pulling some arse-pull saves when things go wrong, and I'm always seeking out the next derp party where I can shine bright as a SCH and a healer.

Welcome back to the salt mines!


You are not crazy, my dude. It has been a year since the dark days of our kits being gutted, and we're looking at a year or more of this crap before there's a small CHANCE of change... But even then, the player-dev trust is in such a sorry, tattered state that many of us are more worried about things getting worse, rather than being hopeful for improvements. Scholar, in particular (like others mentioned) was even worse than the empty husk it was before you came back. And what's being done about it...? Just giving AST attention and buffs... AST, currently the superlative healer in almost every aspect, needs more buffs, the devs think. Not Scholar, who has a fairy no better than an oGCD in a kit already bloated with oGCDs, who got more skills just completely axed with zero replacements than any other job in any other patch.


Many healers have been commenting, ever since the first job adjustment reveal prior to Shadowbringers, that the state of those jobs will be unacceptably terrible. We were told "Just wait and see." Between us, 100ks, if not millions, of collective healing experience, and we get talked down to like we've never even played Scholar before, like we don't know the first thing about it... Like we need to actually play it to know that removing, of all the twelve-blessed abilities borne from the facets of our job crystal, ENERGY DRAIN would make Scholar BETTER.


It's beyond my comprehension how anybody on that team thought they were helping us.

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Originally Posted by Gravagar

You are not crazy, my dude. It has been a year since the dark days of our kits being gutted, and we're looking at a year or more of this crap before there's a small CHANCE of change... But even then, the player-dev trust is in such a sorry, tattered state that many of us are more worried about things getting worse, rather than being hopeful for improvements.

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This is one of the biggest fears I've had since I saw the ShB job previews. Why? Because I have already experienced it.

I had been playing XIV since ARR but always only for maybe a month or two because a different mmo was occupying most of my time, WoW. By the time I left that game in Legion I had been playing for about 12 years. When WoD came out in 2014 and they removed an incredible number of skills from every single class in the game I was already dreading the direction the game was going and only had those fears confirmed when the Legion expansion further reduced most classes to an extremely basic set of skills. Gone were the support or very niche but fun abilities you had and instead you would spend most of the time spamming the same 3 buttons with the occasional burst window. The gameplay was so mindnumbingly boring that no amount of content could keep me interested and I had to leave 12 years of memories and dedication to this one game behind. At that time I remembered that XIV had gotten it's 2nd expansion, Stormblood, a while ago, I picked it up and never looked back.



Now imagine my feelings when I look at Shadowbringers and see the same pattern emerging in XIV. It isn't nearly as bad yet but even in WoW it started with small things, removal of abilities that were rarely used outside of pvp or several skills simply combined into one, but this is not a road you want to follow to the end.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

Now imagine my feelings when I look at Shadowbringers and see the same pattern emerging in XIV. It isn't nearly as bad yet but even in WoW it started with small things, removal of abilities that were rarely used outside of pvp or several skills simply combined into one, but this is not a road you want to follow to the end.

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Exactly my fears. FF14's a long way off from being as bad as WoW, but it's starting to show the same signs. It's more and more about accessibility, trying to entice players into classes or content they don't enjoy and pruning stuff they see as unnecessary. Lazier players get used to this and start finding more things they find tedious and complaining about them, the devs prune them and the cycle continues. Look at some of the complaints on General, so far we've had requests to remove all DoTs, positionals, maintenance buffs, raid buffs, consolidate combos and move utility away from dps. Can you imagine if they implemented all these things?

Sadly developers get trapped into looking at numbers. They see that healers, or crafters, or gatherers or tanks or so on don't have a high participation rate, decide this is wrong and they need to change it so a large majority of players are doing that content. What they fail to see is that playing a healer (for example) is simply not everyone's cup of tea. That's normal. To tempt people over who don't enjoy these activities, you have to wreck them and hand them over for free, which is what they're doing. Even then, you won't get a high long-term participation rate because the players who don't like healing will get bored easily.

I wish they'd make classes for the people who like that class. Give people who enjoyed FF14 healing an indepth immersive experience. Stop designing classes for people who don't like that class.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

Can you imagine if they implemented all these things?

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I can imagine it a bit too well and it will be the moment where I will be gone without thinking twice. This shit got me to stop playing a game I spent 12 years of my life on, it sure as hell will make me stop playing any other game.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

Look at some of the complaints on General

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I only needed to look at the "Savage is too hard, pls nerf" thread in Dungeons to get the idea, it's almost as bad as taking gameplay advice from people on Twitter and Facebook that don't even have half their skills in their hotbars at lvl 80.


*edit*...I just looked at General...and now I want to wipe the last hour of my memory

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Originally Posted by Gravagar

...It's beyond my comprehension how anybody on that team thought they were helping us.

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I've said it before, I played Scholar because I loved the complexity, the challenge; If I was feeling potato I could focus healing, if I wanted to feel like a bamf dpsing, DoT healing, shields like I seriously was RPing in my head as this cool battle healer nerd thing muh dood it was da shih-tzu.

I actually really appreciated that they had healers that could accommodate different healing play styles, just like some dps classes have a higher skill ceiling.

But I was heartbroken that they killed my Scholar. It really has sucked the fun out of the game from me. I've been playing mmos over ten years and to have everything that I've learned as a healer, a player, skill wise, tactics, recoveries in sticky situations, etc etc

The dev team spat in my face saying "get used to it" and basically in a diplomatic way said f__k you, I don't care about what you think, this is our game.

Actually, even that would have been more communication than we've gotten so far.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

Exactly my fears. FF14's a long way off from being as bad as WoW, but it's starting to show the same signs. It's more and more about accessibility, trying to entice players into classes or content they don't enjoy and pruning stuff they see as unnecessary. Lazier players get used to this and start finding more things they find tedious and complaining about them, the devs prune them and the cycle continues. Look at some of the complaints on General, so far we've had requests to remove all DoTs, positionals, maintenance buffs, raid buffs, consolidate combos and move utility away from dps. Can you imagine if they implemented all these things?

Sadly developers get trapped into looking at numbers. They see that healers, or crafters, or gatherers or tanks or so on don't have a high participation rate, decide this is wrong and they need to change it so a large majority of players are doing that content. What they fail to see is that playing a healer (for example) is simply not everyone's cup of tea. That's normal. To tempt people over who don't enjoy these activities, you have to wreck them and hand them over for free, which is what they're doing. Even then, you won't get a high long-term participation rate because the players who don't like healing will get bored easily.

I wish they'd make classes for the people who like that class. Give people who enjoyed FF14 healing an indepth immersive experience. Stop designing classes for people who don't like that class.

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Oof, fully agree. The devs need to survey people who love a class instead of only making changes based on suggestions from people who hate or hardly ever play a class.

I was a former Nin main that abandoned it because I hated the 5.1 overhaul so much.
Now there's a bunch of angry Nin mains (some even quit the game) and a group of mostly new people that loved the changes because Nin is now a lot easier.

It's infuriating, if they hated Nin so much, why not just pick another easier class like RDM or DNC instead of ranting on forums and ruining others' class.

Reminds me of people asking for pet removal in summoner. Why even play it if you hate pets? Jeez

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Originally Posted by Yani-Madara

I was a former Nin main that abandoned it because I hated the 5.1 overhaul so much.
Now there's a bunch of angry Nin mains (some even quit the game) and a group of mostly new people that loved the changes because Nin is now a lot easier.

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I have to confess I actually liked the 5.1 Nin changes, specifically the Ninjutsu change, couldn't care less about the rest. My main issue with the old Ninjutsus was that I lost count of how many times I pressed them too fast for the game to register, so instead of Ten -> Chi -> Jin I'd end up with Ten -> Jin and my Trick Attack was completely screwed. I hate having to stare at my hotbars to check if the game didn't arbitrarily decide that the skill didn't go off.

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Originally Posted by Yani-Madara

Reminds me of people asking for pet removal in summoner.

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No way ...
That can't be true, can it?
WTF...
Can you reply with a link to this?

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Originally Posted by ItMe

No way ...
That can't be true, can it?
WTF...
Can you reply with a link to this?

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I believe it mostly refers to people wanting the current iteration of Egi removed, specifically because they prefer the Demi-Egi model that focuses around a burst window where the Egi gets to uniquely affect SMN’s DPS rotation. I’ve pointed out to those people that this is just Bard’s songs dressed up with SMN’s aesthetics, and they’ve argued “it works, so why not?”, ignoring that part of what makes those windows work is the fact they’re limited to a subsection of the overall rotation rather than being the core, and that players can like jobs for their distinctive mechanical flavour in addition to aesthetics. It would, in effect, make the two “DoT jobs” less unique when compared to one another. I’ve been against the idea since the DPS threads first started popping up in stormblood. But I’ve also had to explain why SMN has DoTs for both lore and mechanical reasons before to the people who want to remove those, too.

Point is, people have a habit of designing their own fun away if they don’t look at the consequences of their choices overall instead of in isolation. There’s a reason I personally limit my suggestions to what the devs have already done before except in the case of pet AI specifically. I’m trying to lower the cost of development time by doing so. Numbers, however, are always interchangeable. Gameplay is much harder to enforce.

Right now I can atleast understand removing SCH pets due to their atrocious design, it's basically just a glorified oGCD but not even as reliable as one...


This does apply to SMN pets as well to a certain extend. Does that mean I actually want them removed? No, I would prefer SE to maybe not undo their pet fixes made in Stormblood in favor of making them infinitely worse.

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Originally Posted by Kinks

I've said it before, I played Scholar because I loved the complexity, the challenge; If I was feeling potato I could focus healing, if I wanted to feel like a bamf dpsing, DoT healing, shields like I seriously was RPing in my head as this cool battle healer nerd thing muh dood it was da shih-tzu.

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Seriously what was wrong with having one complex healer, one easy(er) healer

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Originally Posted by ItMe

No way ...
That can't be true, can it?
WTF...
Can you reply with a link to this?

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I advocate for a pet removal for summoner. I want summoners to, y'know, actually summon things. Where the summons do the damage. Not a wonky AI pet.

Imagine:

For Aoe: 3 part chain Ifrit > Garuda > Bismark

For Single Target: Titan > Ramuh > Ravana

It could be expanded but that's the general idea. Part of your job quests are going and communing with the summons to master them.