Scholar feels kinda wonky

I used to play a lot pre stormblood before all the changes, those changes are why I dropped summoner as my main class and swapped to dancer. I was one of those scumbag summoners who would use scholar to instaqueue dungeons. I went to use scholar to level summoner and gave up after one dungeon and just used summoner to level.
But like I geared up completely and while the tank doesn't die anymore, I'm still mashing physick sometimes on big pulls.
The fairy feels completely weaker. Aetherflow not being available prepull is a stupid change, why would they do that. And I understand Lustrate is supposed to be our "cure 2" but with aetherflow tied to so many actions, we need either a better cooldown for aetherflow or have it be usable outside of battles. Or improve the fairy's cure potency.

I like doing heals from time to time and I'm giving up on scholar. Astro is fun, but is a controller nightmare, and whm is just not fun to me. It feels like facesmashing.

Am I doing scholar wrong?

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Originally Posted by queenevilfluffy

Am I doing scholar wrong?

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There are a few things just from your post I can see that are a bit of a misconception.

Adloquium is your Cure 2, not Lustrate. Lustrate is by far the lowest priority for Aetherflow use. The only time I've ever needed/wanted to use it is if the tank is hemorrhaging HP like it's going out of style or if I'm in lower content where the other Aetherflow abilities aren't yet available. Lustrate used to be SCH's best abilities, but the other Aetherflow abilities outpace it as the Scholar levels up. E.g. Sacred Soil, particularly at 80 when it gains a regen, is one of the best heals we have. Excogitation is straight up a more powerful heal with better utility than Lustrate. And even Indomitability is more useful than Lustrate 90% of the time since if one person has lost HP it's most likely that they're not the only one that needs healing.

The fairy can definitely feel weak since its healing is second hand to yours and delayed, but it's definitely more powerful than it feels. On a typical dungeon run, my fairy accounts for about 60% of all the healing I do for example. During a full pull in a dungeon, as another example, Seraph can handle most of the healing herself as long as you use her abilities, have a pre-cast Adloquium and Excogitation in place and plop down a Sacred Soil. Only if the DPS is a little slow do I have to worry about tossing out another Adloquium or Excogitation. Sometimes the initial Excog doesn't even trigger. In general, you get the most use out of her (and Scholar in general) by knowing fights and planning ahead. Making good use of abilities in conjunction with each other is also key. E.g. Recitation with Excogitation most of the time, Whispering Dawn with Fey Blessing, knowing when it's best to use Emergency Tactics with Adloquium, etc.

The problems with Scholar aren't with how well it heals, it does that just fine. Problems do exist with it, however, but they are more that when doing single target damage any oGCD healing results a larger dps loss than it does for AST/WHM, and using the fairy can be clunky with most of the fairy abliities being somewhat disjointed from each other. Since there's a delay before she executes the action, you have to be really careful with using multiple fairy abilities in a row since you can easily cause her to put an ability on cooldown but not have her use it. My rule of thumb to avoid this is never double weave any fairy abilities if at all possible, and if I do double weave then I make sure to not use a fairy ability on the following GCD. The fairy gauge is mostly useless too since it's only tied to 2 abilities, one of which has a really long CD of 60s so has no meaningful impact on the gauge level so the gauge really is only used for the one ability. The other disjointed thing is that several fairy abliities are mutually exclusive. Disjunction completely takes away the fairy, Fey Union prevents the fairy from using anything else while linked (although it doesn't outright prevent it - using a fairy ability during Fey Union just causes the fairy to cancel the link to use the ability) and Seraph locks you out of both of those.

If I had to sum up the difference between WHM, SCH and AST in a single sentence for someone who has never played them before it would be that WHM is the most straightforward healer, AST is the busiest/speediest healer, and SCH is the most complex healer.

That's because SCH is clunky and pet AI is even worse. Not to be dark about SCH but in SB it was much better.

The fairy was stronger, the kit felt good and while things like Recitation and improved Dissipation are welcome. The job was changed from great to worse imo.

The ability to cast fairy skills independently from your actions is gone. Basically your fairy is Beacon while you have to cast them as oGCDs. This introduced another problem, ghosting. If you double weaved fairy skills there's a good chance one of them may not go off. This is due to how they made the fairy unresponsive and slow.

On top of that, SCH lost a decent portion of their DoTs to weave their oGCDs inbetween, causing you to eat a DPS loss if you need to weave outside of your normal Biolysis timer. Since they have a bunch of oGCDs, making sacrifices are inevitable.

The whole role is in a need of a rework tbh, but I think SCH is in a rough spot and needs a bit of QoL changes to make it feel less clunky.

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Originally Posted by Mhaeric

The problems with Scholar aren't with how well it heals, it does that just fine. Problems do exist with it, however, but they are more that when doing single target damage any oGCD healing results a larger dps loss than it does for AST/WHM, and using the fairy can be clunky with most of the fairy abliities being somewhat disjointed from each other.

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I wish we had a Damaging oCD that consumed Fairy gauge rather than AF. While we have Energy Drain consuming Aetherflow we will always have this problem of losing dps over healing.

We could have gotten the SMN treatment and have Energy Drain grant AF charges instead.

On a side note I also would like to have more impactful damage animations. If we get Kaustra as the big satisfying finish damaging spell at some point, I hope it looks spectacular.

I just want a1. 5s broil and a macro command to place the fairy at the center of the map

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Originally Posted by GrimGale

While we have Energy Drain consuming Aetherflow we will always have this problem of losing dps over healing.

We could have gotten the SMN treatment and have Energy Drain grant AF charges instead

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Yep. Imo, the technical issues resulting from the fairy rework (as others have mentioned) combined with the weird design choices that make you actively force you to choose between healing and DPSing (not only w/ uptime, but via resources) make SCH supremely unfun to play.

Everything about it feels wrong, and the sad thing is that I didn't even realize how bad it was until I started healing savage content with my static.
The fairy just eats your abilities sometimes? Big oof.
You have to burn all your Aetherflow on Energy Drain to deal reasonable dps? Ehhhh....
You don't actually ever want to use your shields, the entire mechanic that makes you unique? Smh.

I had to stop playing SCH. I just wasn't having fun. I was always so frustrated trying to play it at a high level. And I'm glad I did, but it's still a shame. I want to love the job, but I just can't put up with all of it's issues.

I’m enjoying the new tools we got and the fact that QA is gone and Dissipation is good now does add more to its gameplay for me, but I miss a lot too. I wish timing Deploy for double shields wasn’t so difficult now (You can do it, it's not worth it), and more DoTs and a better Ruin II would be appreciated. Fairy oGCDs feel better at my ping and latency levels (stable, but around 200) than it used to, but I get why people prefer the old system. It's consistent now, but you get a variable delay that can eat the input entirely, and you have to weave it in your GCD. Back then, you could mash and it would go off immediately, even while you're hard-casting. The same Place override nonsense still works if you're willing to do it, and Place itself can be done while hardcasting still too, but it's not worth it nearly as much as it used to be.

For dps, restoring some of SCH's former DoTs (One hardcast with a super long duration, 45s maybe, one instant GCD with 21s for more weaving opportunities), and adding an independent charge based dps cooldown for extra double weaving opportunities is all I really want. Healing wise I feel all three healers need tuning down so they achieve similar throughput in unique ways, while actually needing to engage with their GCDs more, including SCH. For them specifically I think reintroducing Bane then upgrading it to Deployment Tactics would be ideal, but beyond that I'm not sold on anything 'extra' healing wise. I don't feel SCH needs a lot, just enough to make using what they do have less obnoxious or overbearing when put in an environment where they're 'good' relative to the other two like they used to be. Most of the Tank and Healer interactions from pre-ShB were worth keeping around, just not Quickened Aetherflow and Rouse specifically.

Why do they simply not lower the cast time of Broil? Like AST do have. That would make SCH feel so much better. AST still has the ability to do full dps while moving with lightspeed.

They fixed the pet double weave lost CD. I double weave sometimes, works just fine. Fairy gauge seems pretty weak thou. Ruin 2 is instant cast for weaving and moving.

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Originally Posted by Bsrking5

They fixed the pet double weave lost CD. I double weave sometimes, works just fine. Fairy gauge seems pretty weak thou. Ruin 2 is instant cast for weaving and moving.

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Ruin 2 is damage loss. Imo all healers should have their default attack cast time reduced. Would lessen the pain when weaving. AST has it already so no need there.

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Originally Posted by Gorondu

Ruin 2 is damage loss. Imo all healers should have their default attack cast time reduced. Would lessen the pain when weaving. AST has it already so no need there.

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This would make playing scholar sooo much better for me. Only other gripe is relying on Energy Drain to deal more DPS. It just isn't fun.

Double weaving sucks but I find if a skill goes on CD w/o casting if you mash it repeatedly after the fact it CAN go off, like the game itself going "Oh oops." but the mashing has to commence like a second you notice the pet skill going on CD. SCH feels the most compromised even though as mentioned earlier in the thread the numbers on paper are there. I'd personally prefer the Fairy gets removed completely but I'm in the minority on that count so hopefully the devs can fix the pet AI so it's serviceable cuz that Seraph change they did where the duration of her is an uneven number was pretty embarrassing as a workaround to whatever issue they found with it.

Its queued in, you don't have to mash it in. Your just not waiting the gcd for it. This is a fixed issue.

the bug was the same as bahamut had. seraph has a 2 second delay after summon at casting abilities so to preserve her 20 second summon duration they added 2 seconds where she does nothing while bahamut issue was fixed. they both got those changes at the same patch

Ty both for clarifying, seems my memory isn't as it once was in recent times.

It's not fixed. This happened to me this week. The fairy will sometimes not cast abilities if you weave them too quickly. The fairy's queue also doesn't behave like one would expect. If you have an ability in the queue and use another fairy ability before the queued one starts then she will use the new ability and delay the queued one further and she will straight up forget about a queued ability when some abilities ar used

I was under the impression that Ruin 2 and Energy Drain was a dps gain over Broil that allowed weaving a second oGCD and free movement. That seems almost busted to me. Aetherflow charges are valuable tho so getting the full potential out of Ruin 2 isnt always possible but it seems perfectly fine to me the way it is now. Quickened Aetherflow in StB made Scholar a lot more fun becuase Ruin 2 and Energy Drain became a much more noticeable part of the gameplay. It was a little something extra to do that wasnt overwhelming. Now there is absolutley nothing extra to do and I hate it. Fairy abilities still get eaten if you arent lucky but we all just refuse to queue certain things together to avoid the possibility of failure. No Dissipation or Summon Seraph until you see an ability activate. Its a shame you have to be careful like that but Ive learned to use one ability at a time and mostly put the annoyance behind me.

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Originally Posted by NobleWinter

I was under the impression that Ruin 2 and Energy Drain was a dps gain over Broil that allowed weaving a second oGCD and free movement. That seems almost busted to me.

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It’s a DPS gain over broil, but a loss to using them in Bio refreshes (2 bio + swiftcast broil), and even using all 3 on Ruins, you’d only get 3 weaves per minute (versus WHM’s 4 weave slots per minute from Lilies).
I just want to reiterate that; SCH gets fewer weaving windows than WHM. Fewer still if you want to use Seraph, Recitation, or an Aetherflow heal.

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Originally Posted by NobleWinter

I was under the impression that Ruin 2 and Energy Drain was a dps gain over Broil that allowed weaving a second oGCD and free movement. That seems almost busted to me.

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It says a lot about the state of healers and how low our expectations are when being allowed to weave a damage Ogcd and move a little is seen as "almost busted". Some of us seem to feel that healers are meant to be clunky to play because we're so used to it now.

As mentioned, it's a dps gain over Broil but you're still losing out compared to an actual free weave like Bio. Broil III is 280, Ruin II + Energy Drain is 350 which means you're still paying the tax and your ED is basically an extra 70 potency over that Broil... which is actually quite pathetic.

Scholar played well and putting out good heals can weave a fair bit, so why they should have to pay tax while AST can run rings around the arena with free weave windows and LS is baffling.

I meant busted when you consider the two oGCD uses. Bio refreshes every 30 seconds. Many fights Ive noticed have movement based around 30 second intervals. Hades Extreme for instance and Memoria both have you dodging mechanics at your dot refresh point 30 seconds in. Its kind of a nice gesture from the Devs. Ruin 2 is meant for times when you cant rely on that Dot refresh window and being able to move while dealing more damage than standing still as the title "Caster" denotes is wild to me. You even get to throw in a healing action like Whispering Dawn or Indom easily and that makes Ruin 2 incredibly dense with potential when used well. I feel like its really underestimated in all these discussions where the default is to simply call it a dps loss as if Bio is always going to be a dps gain. Refreshing Bio in rapid succession to move across the stage with energy drain is not a gain. Ruin 2 has many moments where it is the superior option. Is the boss going to be invlunerable in less than 2.5 seconds? Ruin 2 to say bye with a bang!

Yeah... I genuinely hate how Sch plays, its extremely clunky feeling now. Whm and Ast are easy and smooth as butter to handle now, but Sch with pet action delay, the lackluster healing, and the ganky dps, personally just feels like garbo to play...

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Originally Posted by Hanayumi

Whm and Ast are easy and smooth as butter to handle now

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...Have we played the same ClipMage? WHM is practically immobile and requires clipping your GCD or overwriting your Dia to weave in your oGCDs. That's not my definition of smooth.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

...Have we played the same ClipMage? WHM is practically immobile and requires clipping your GCD or overwriting your Dia to weave in your oGCDs. That's not my definition of smooth.

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Lol, when has anyone that played Whm cared about clipping and weaving? Certainly not the devs thats for sure, even so its still way more fun and flowy than what Sch currently brings...

I don't know how to explain it but to me SCH feels fun at ARR/HW levels but on higher level content it feels....disconnected. It's like, it has a kit for everything but at the same time it doesn't feel it belongs there, if that makes sense. It just...doesn't go with the flow as good as AST or even WHM do.

I was SCH main- Still am 2.X and some 3.X content and I too cannot know what are the positive sides to the class. Granted, I am not lvl 80 but that is not even the point, it is how bad the old skills and new go together and how much class identity is lost due to the pet nerfs (why do we have two fairies if we essentially have one? just remove the other at that point and do not fool us)

Some of old aetherflow looping works but I also cannot just fathom why it cannot be triggered outside combat. This usually forces me to open up with DPS and remember to aetherflow after first few things and hope nothing happens to the tank to distract me from starting my aetherflow loop earlier rather than later.

I also missed the class identity of stacking lot of debuffs and bane, now there is just Art of War, "make enemy taek crit" and - that is it. Just slam one button in dungeon pulls instead of applying DOT's and AOE DOT that tank has to work with in tandem. I feel like main reason is the game is so fast and the dots so slow that it would not work but... Just make the dot's faster? Or whatever else.

For first time I am enjoying white mage immensely more than SCH before even hitting 70 on white mage because lily system is like better aetherflow/lustrate if you are like me, and in old times would keep aetherflows for emergencies that just happened with lot of new players in completely new game.

I dunno how raiding is, I dunno what the final 4 levels will bring to SCH toolkit but pet management was fun, but now gone, I know that I can force the PET ai to become consistent through place command that I still have thank god, but I learned that because I had to use the place command to keep my pet alive in the first place and went "oh, so if she is forced to stay still, my movement will not factor to cancelling her embrace spam" - I also liked the two fairies removal of which is unfair given AST gets to keep it's duality to extent. Eos could be buffed temporarily to heal the same as you, do AOE heal etc, while selene was giving attack buffs and debuffing enemies in trade of less heal/healing supportive actions and now I think we have just tbe 1st skill of both fairies. I am going off memory that is mostly 7 years late at this point so do excuse me.


I can understand that SCH was simplified in HW it was a class I would recommend PS3 players to not try unless they wanted to be challenged because of it's skills, and pet placement among some of class skills like Shadowflare and bubble needing placement that was awkward with controller for long short while until it was improved upon. in HW I think I thought "well now it is better, still challenge to controller players but I could just and just do it, though not as well as keyboard and mouse that I am more used to anyway."

I should like Art of war in paper, but in principle it is just poor man's holy and I do not think SCH gained from it enough for the loss of everything else.


I dunno just go crazy, make it so that you have passive buff or something depending on the fairy chosen and whatever. Heck, give us pixies as alternative to the fairies or something too.

Overall the class is not... Bad? it is just less good than even the class I would before not consider maining because it was bit less engaging than SCH was, which I enjoyed. Now I am thinking of swapping just while leveling the alt class. A lot of it is "feelings" etc. but I really feel as SCH doing only part of the things I used to, while having poor man's holy and lot of players have ranked SCH as just. According to some calculated data SCH cannot even output damage like White mage (Best) or AST (Way better than SCH) that is silly, since SCH is partially a Summoner as Summoner is partially a SCH, through their ACN base. This class fantasy is gone too because despite this, there is not even much of attack buffs.


This is also a slight thing but I cannot understand why they removed aetherflow progression from lvl 30, it used to be you started getting the stacks starting with 1 from lvl 30/35 onward and start doing at least energy drain. Now they just removed it because it is not useful with new mana system that I am not commenting on further in this post because that is not entirely bad things even to me.


TL;DR: It mostly feels like SCH is these days doing a third of what they used to and the 2/3rds is not filled enough with new stuff, it is like there is small third still missing.

I know these things are hard but never ever did I think about seriously swapping from SCH before this. Not just because I want to be as useful as possible for any raid group I might end up playing with for a short while but because it extra hurts when I have some of the things I still do enjoy a lot but it just does not feel like full package of the new upgrade the class should have had in trade. And no, I do not count new names and animations for the essentially same skill that, which is something I can understand but also not fooling me.

Other side is that ingame trying to inquire about these changes, to get a perspective of those who play the class now went "Well you clearly hate it now and would not understand " like I asked because I don't but want to the shit is this novice network?

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Originally Posted by Hanayumi

Lol, when has anyone that played Whm cared about clipping and weaving? Certainly not the devs thats for sure, even so its still way more fun and flowy than what Sch currently brings...

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Oh I see. This is standard SCH pearl-clutching "I just Feel So Weak" while side-snipe implying that WHM is for Stoopid Healers who don't care about things like weaving or anything other than Cure spamming. Nothing I haven't heard pretty much nonstop since Heavensward. Welcome to the bottom of the barrel for healer design; the fact that Scholars still take the opportunity to assert this necessitates that they and AST (and they alone, if pressed) deserve better makes me all the more glad I dropped my staff for a DPS role. If SCHs and ASTs are going to react to the Shadowbringers changes with "EW, being a braindead job is WHM's thing! Jeeves, leave them down in this garbage pit and take me back to my manor!" then good luck with 6.0. Y'all deserve this fate.

Scholars gonna Scholar. Carry on.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

Oh I see. This is standard SCH pearl-clutching "I just Feel So Weak" while side-snipe implying that WHM is for Stoopid Healers who don\\'t care about things like weaving or anything other than Cure spamming. Nothing I haven\\'t heard pretty much nonstop since Heavensward. Welcome to the bottom of the barrel for healer design; the fact that Scholars still take the opportunity to assert this necessitates that they and AST (and they alone, if pressed) deserve better makes me all the more glad I dropped my staff for a DPS role. If SCHs and ASTs are going to react to the Shadowbringers changes with "EW, being a braindead job is WHM\\'s thing! Jeeves, leave them down in this garbage pit and take me back to my manor!" then good luck with 6.0. Y\\'all deserve this fate.

Scholars gonna Scholar. Carry on.

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Whm is in no way bottom barrel, Whm is a beast of a healer and fun to use. I was implying that a job doesnt necessarily need tons of ogcd or have few hard casts to be decent, and knowing devs they\\'ll prolly keep Whm that way. Yet Sch has plenty of these tools but flows so horribly. Anyway, there is definitely a decline of Schs right now, have yet to pug savage as of 5.3 but while running the usual roulettes, unreal, and farming the current Ex, a vast majority of healers have been Whm and Ast, and hopefully devs notice this so they can give Sch some needed changes...

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Originally Posted by Gorondu

Ruin 2 is damage loss. Imo all healers should have their default attack cast time reduced. Would lessen the pain when weaving. AST has it already so no need there.

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sch and whm both weave a lot and now lose damage to heal and have far worse mobility despite constantly getting a large number of ogcds added, it seems absurd to me that not all spam skills are 1.5

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

Oh I see. This is standard SCH pearl-clutching "I just Feel So Weak" while side-snipe implying that WHM is for Stoopid Healers who don't care about things like weaving or anything other than Cure spamming. Nothing I haven't heard pretty much nonstop since Heavensward. Welcome to the bottom of the barrel for healer design; the fact that Scholars still take the opportunity to assert this necessitates that they and AST (and they alone, if pressed) deserve better makes me all the more glad I dropped my staff for a DPS role. If SCHs and ASTs are going to react to the Shadowbringers changes with "EW, being a braindead job is WHM's thing! Jeeves, leave them down in this garbage pit and take me back to my manor!" then good luck with 6.0. Y'all deserve this fate.

Scholars gonna Scholar. Carry on.

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I do not feel week, I feel like I am playing a worse WHM

SCH is clunky because every single thing about it contradicts itself.

Its lore is supposed to be this tactician healer that relies on it's fairy for support. Yet it's Adlo has been nerfed, it's fairy has been nerfed, it's dps abilities have been nerfed in favor of reactive healing.

Then, it's capstone skills directly contradict each other and aren't even needed in 90% of content.

Atherpact locks it out of doing anything else.
Dissipate removes the fairy entirely and it's +healing affects all of 2 SCH Spells. Spells most people say you shouldn't be using anyway. But Deceptus, You can use those stacks to Energy Drain! Great, a 450 Potency attack on a 3 minute CD. Not exactly strong. But Deceptus, You can use those stacks to Lustrate! If you're in a situation where Lustrate is needed that badly, you failed as a SCH.
Seraph has been a clunky mess since it was implemented. You'd think that the abilities under it would somehow be stronger because the fairy becomes stronger right? WRONG.

Whispering Dawn turns into Angel's Whisper and is exactly the same.
Fey Illumination turns into Seraphic Illumination and is exactly the same.

SCH DPS is objectively higher than its ever been. Baning Bio/Bio 2/Miasma is still weaker than Art of War spam since there's no longer any drop off. Those dots were 20-30 potency each, Art of War is 160 potency. Ruin II is 200 potency now, up from 100 from SB, Dissipation doesn't kill your fairy, so you no longer waste a GCD re-summoning her.

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Originally Posted by Jonnycbad

SCH DPS is objectively higher than its ever been. Baning Bio/Bio 2/Miasma is still weaker than Art of War spam since there's no longer any drop off. Those dots were 20-30 potency each, Art of War is 160 potency. Ruin II is 200 potency now, up from 100 from SB, Dissipation doesn't kill your fairy, so you no longer waste a GCD re-summoning her.

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Well, duh. Of course it's higher than it's ever been, we're lvl 80 now. Bio and Misma spread is only weaker than AoW if you don't factor in Miasma 2 which was 100 potency + another 100 potency over time and Shadowflare.

Ruin 2's buff is nice but it only brings it up to the same potency as Miasma 2 was in StB which was always the superior option for weaving back then. Combine that with it only being a 70 potency gain over Broil 3 if you weave in an Energy Drain and an 80 potency loss without ED + the fact that we have less Aetherflow over the course of a fight than we did in StB and you can see the issue.


This isn't to say that SCH is godawful, it's just incredibly uninteresting to play. A lot of it's kit is rarely ever even utilized and spending 5 minutes out of an 8 minutes fight spamming Broil isn't exactly engaging.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

A lot of it's kit is rarely ever even utilized and spending 5 minutes out of an 8 minutes fight spamming Broil isn't exactly engaging.

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I'd argue the same can be said for WHM. SCH barely uses Adlo/Succor/Physick/Fey Illumination, Fey Union, Seraph. WHM barely uses Cure, Cure 2, Medica 1, Regen, Fluid Aura, and also spends 5minutes out of an 8 minute fight spamming Glare.

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Originally Posted by Jonnycbad

I'd argue the same can be said for WHM. SCH barely uses Adlo/Succor/Physick/Fey Illumination, Fey Union, Seraph. WHM barely uses Cure, Cure 2, Medica 1, Regen, Fluid Aura, and also spends 5minutes out of an 8 minute fight spamming Glare.

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You use Seraph rather frequently because it has the only actually useful shield, an oGCD. But that's exactly the problem, it isn't just SCH that's affected by the current healer design. The only reason it's even more noticeable on SCH is because, unlike WHM, it never had this kind of atrocious gameplay before...also doesn't help that they made the fairy worse with ShB, both in ai behaviour and effectiveness.

I disagree with your second point. Now that the fairy skills are oGCD, they respond much more readily than ever before, within 1-2 seconds (assuming you didn't queue more than 1 fey skill back-to-back). Before, when Fey skills were just Pet Commands, the fairy might be in the middle of casting Embrace when you used Whispering Dawn. Because the skill wasn't really queued with high priority, often times the fairy would just continue to cast Embrace and you had to tap your pet command multiple times or a macro with multiple instances of the command to force it to the top of her priority. Along with making Embrace an instant cast on anyone <100% HP (previously it was a 2s cast on anyone below 80?%), the skills always activate when pressed, assuming the fairy is not removed from the battlefield (using a Fey skill followed by Dissipation will cause the fairy to be dismissed before the fey skill is used since there's a 1.5s delay, and also if you use Consolation or otherwise when Seraph has < 3s remaining since she uses Seraphic Veil every GCD.

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Originally Posted by Jonnycbad

I disagree with your second point. Now that the fairy skills are oGCD, they respond much more readily than ever before, within 1-2 seconds (assuming you didn't queue more than 1 fey skill back-to-back). Before, when Fey skills were just Pet Commands, the fairy might be in the middle of casting Embrace when you used Whispering Dawn. Because the skill wasn't really queued with high priority, often times the fairy would just continue to cast Embrace and you had to tap your pet command multiple times or a macro with multiple instances of the command to force it to the top of her priority. Along with making Embrace an instant cast on anyone <100% HP (previously it was a 2s cast on anyone below 80?%), the skills always activate when pressed, assuming the fairy is not removed from the battlefield (using a Fey skill followed by Dissipation will cause the fairy to be dismissed before the fey skill is used since there's a 1.5s delay, and also if you use Consolation or otherwise when Seraph has < 3s remaining since she uses Seraphic Veil every GCD.

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First off, Faerie skills at the end of SB were fixed and super responsive (at least as responsive as now if you ignore consolation) since the faerie would stop what she was doing to run your skills. There was no delay and the skills weren't on your own gcd. So saying we had to wait and stuff, although correct for a portion of the expansion, was NOT where SCH was when the expansion hit.

Secondly, embrace used to be something you could factor into your healing because it was powerful enough to carry some healing (some will, rightfully so, argue too powerful). Not only that but you could use it outside of your GCD to proc divine veil for instance or target heal a specific person. Currently, embrace mitigates a bit of tank healing but that's about it and you cannot take it into account at all. That is to say that you ignore it. That's a huge downgrade in both efficacy and gameplay, HUGE. It's akin to the old lily system that you didn't even need to have on your hotbar. If it does something, that's cool, if it doesn't, not a problem since you never factored it in.

Thirdly, consolation is horribly clunky, the fact you say you have to use it within 3s of the end of seraph just shows how long that order takes to execute. And that isn't even approaching the topic of the almost FULL GCD delay before you can even use the skill when summoning seraph or all the ghosting that goes on. And all this with the added constraint of having to use your faerie skills within your weaving windows.

No matter how you spin it, it was better before, by a mile.

Also SCH dps being higher than ever before means absolutely nothing. We're lvl 80, of course it'll be higher. What's important is how SCH dps compares to other healers, and how fun SCH dps is compared to before (it's not).

And while I'm in full rant mode. They didn't even get Ruin II/Broil III potencies right. The Ruin II weaving window potency cost is in the weirdest place, where clipping one oGCD could be a dps gain on using Ruin II depending on your ping.... Or how galvanize gets eaten before catalyze which totally ruins it's synergy with recitation and deployment tactics. In other words, clunky af. It's not like we gave SE this feedback before the expansion launched or anything /s.

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Originally Posted by Jonnycbad

Along with making Embrace an instant cast on anyone <100% HP (previously it was a 2s cast on anyone below 80?%)

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Since EaMett already said most of what I was going to say I'm just gonna add this. Yes Eos uses Embrace at <100% HP now but it's not only irrelevant but actually a nerf.

Before ShB Eos would only use it on someone below 80% HP but it did not matter since you had 100% full control over Embrace itself. You were the one who could at any point decide that Eos should cast it on a specific target, regardless of it's HP and regardless of whether you or your fairy were currently casting something else.

Now you not only have absolutely no control over Embrace, so Eos can just randomly cast it on a dps when you want her to heal the tank and there's nothing you can do about it, but the amount it heals is also pitiful compared to it's old version.


And then there are the little intricacies we lost from Stormblood, like knowing that your fairy doesn't get hit by most mechanics. So you could put a crit adlo on your fairy, wait for an aoe to go off and then deploy your adlo from the fairy at 100% strength for the next mechanic.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

And then there are the little intricacies we lost from Stormblood, like knowing that your fairy doesn't get hit by most mechanics. So you could put a crit adlo on your fairy, wait for an aoe to go off and then deploy your adlo from the fairy at 100% strength for the next mechanic.

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Double succor deploy was the best. First time I understood that you could succor the group, get hit by the raid-wide, then deploy the untouched shield off of your faerie to cover a second raid-wide felt great. Like I had crossed a clear line in my skill tier. Looking back at it, it also really highlights how little an upgrade seraph and consolation were for the class since you already basically had half a seraph in stormblood.

While we're on the topic of SCH gameplay, I really regret losing the "melee healer" feel sch had from it's miasma II weaving windows. I feel like that and the absolute slashing of timers to keep track of was what did SCH in. Moreso than the faerie woes.

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Originally Posted by Jonnycbad

I disagree with your second point. Now that the fairy skills are oGCD, they respond much more readily than ever before

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My SB fairy disagree with you.
They fixed the issue and it was fine.