Potential Fixes to SCH's Ongoing Design Problems

I've been a SCH main since pretty much ARR after initially raising a DRG, occasionally dipping my toes in AST, only to come back to SCH due to the added complexity of the job.

Over the years, SCH has been suffering from three problems on the player side, and three problems on SE's side.

On the player's side, the problems was the increase in simplification of our favourite job, the unreliable lag when using fairy skills, along with receiving numerous skills that were extremely awkward to use and mostly pointless.

On SE's side was the problematic pet AI, SCH players that want conflicting things from the job, and a lack of ideas for the job itself.

Personally, while most jobs in FFXIV had received a major rework since their introduction, SCH was one of the few that never got one, and the only one of those that has needed a rework for years.

While I don't consider myself some sort of genius that can solve all of the SE development team's woes with a single post, here, I posit an idea as to how SCH can be reworked to satisfy as many people as possible.

The most fundamental aspects of SCH, personally, are three things: The fairy, aetherflow, and shields/mitigation. These three need to stay and continue to be a core part of the job, or it'll lose it's place.

The fairies are the core of most of SCH's issues. From both the player's perspective, as well as SE's, if my observations are anywhere near accurate.

Eos and Selene are the source of countless woes, from the lack of reliability, to their low potency. And from SE's perspective, nothing but frustration, as any fixes they might want to do wouldn't work without removing or at least lessoning the fairy's importance.

Personally, I think there is one way to do it: remove the fairy as a pet.

Now, while I say remove it as a pet, I don't mean remove it from SCH's kit, nor do I mean lessoning it's import. But rather, change the way the fairy works so that it's far more important than before, but in a way that won't be overwhelming to newer players, but still has space for veteran players to exploit advanced techniques. All the while without burdening the server infrastructure nor adding too much work to the development team.

First, remove the fairies AI in its entirety. It'll simply become a minion that follows the player around in duties with the additional benefit that you can place it elsewhere if you desire. The fairy would have to have a zero MP cost to summon for those players that place the fairy but forget to tell it to follow during dungeons though. It doesn't have to be instant like the SMN, as the cast time could be a way to enforce the healer to remember to move the fairy properly.

Second, all fairy skills become the SCH's own skills. The only caveat, is that the fairy acts as the source of the skill when it comes to location, but otherwise it is entirely the SCH's own skill.

Third, as the fairy would no longer have any skills, the SCH could get a simple regen oGCD as a fairy skill to make up for its lack of AI healing. Instead, embrace could work like how the current aetherpact works, and is the only source of constant healing from the fairy, aesthetically speaking. Just a skill that marks a player and gets a perpetual regen until the mark is moved by the SCH, and the fairy has a green or yellow tether to the target for appearance's sake. In exchange, aetherpact could be a CD that boosts the effects of embrace for a short time, or maybe puts on a regenerating shield?

Fourth, offload some of the SCH's spell effects onto the fairy. Or to be exact, when the SCH casts certain spells, part of the effect originates at the fairy rather than the SCH.

I would say that the ones best for that would be the healing portion of all heal spells except for physick. The fairy heals, while the SCH shields. Perhaps this could be reversed to reduce the pain of a SCH when not having a fairy for whatever reason, but I feel that this is more flavourful than the inverse. The SCH is someone who uses knowledge to protect others' health, while the fairy is a spirit of gentle healing.

This would make the fairy feel much more active than before, and as an added bonus, maybe some veteran players could find a niche where to take advantage of the split effects by having the fairy move out of normal AOE range and split the heal and shield to different players?

Five, with all the changes done already to the fairy, Summon Seraph would have to be changed quite a bit as well. Seraph was originally brought in as a hidden nerf, as when we got it, we had lost rouse, which effectively did almost the same thing but was faster. If the fairy is no longer a pet, then Summon Seraph should reflect that.

First of all, the animation needs to be sped up. It should not take longer than one second to summon. Two at the absolute most, but that still makes it difficult to use for unplanned heal boosts. SE brought in high jump because they thought jump was to slow, so why do they bring in a special fairy that takes so long to come in to heal that the WHM got off Assize, Medica, and Medica 2 all off while giving their SCH partner a dirty look for taking so long to heal the party. It's even worse when the Seraph's special skill, Consolation, is a two charge skill, but half of the weak effect is a shield, which gets cancelled if you use both charges. Doing some napkin potency math, the two shots of Consolation is roughly as strong as a single use of Succor, though succor has a stronger shield while Consolation has a bit more raw healing.

I believe the cure to the Seraph would be to merge it with a few other skills. First, Consolation shouldn't be its own skill, but a part of the Seraph's summoning itself. When it appears, it'll lay down a AOE heal with a shield. In addition, the Seraph would give a potency buff to the SCH and its own heals/shields. Effectively Consolation two charges and Seraphic Illumination would be built in, and the heal buff would continue until the Seraph returns to the void or whatever.

Finally, the summon condition, instead of being on a CD, should be based on the fairy gauge. You can summon it whenever you want as long as you have half a gauge at the cost of 20-30 points, but it'll stay until the gauge empties or is unsummoned. With all this, the Seraph will feel less like some cheap little flashy extra, and more like the healer equivalent of a DPS's burst phase. And even if the extra healing potency isn't useful, at the very least, you can summon it for the AOE shield/heal.

These changes to Seraph would also fix the main issue of the fairy gauge, which is that most SCH end up just letting it fill up because Aetherpact is so worthless most of the time. Aetherpact, as it is, is basically just WHM's regen but slightly stronger, at the cost of not being able to use any of the fairy related skills without a significant delay by breaking the fae union. Not useless, but extremely restrictive and the effect is quite hard to notice when the fairy was already applying what was effectively a weaker regen without any of the new restrictions.

These five changes, while quite extensive, are probably on the simpler side to actually implement, and would both do wonders to fix and even improve the fairy. From the responsiveness to how active it'll become, and it'll really strengthen the feeling that the SCH is a different healer from the others, all without introducing any complex hard to implement mechanics.

The next part is Aetherflow.

Personally, I don't think much has to be done with it at all. While I would like it to be more mechanically driven than simply being a resource to gain with one button and used on some skills, it is technically fine on its own. Maybe being able to reduce the CD on it like in SB would be nice, though I would be down for a reduction on Excogitation's CD instead.

The third part of SCH's fundamentals is shields/mitigation.

Frankly speaking, I think SCH's in a decent place here. The thing about mitigation is that it's something which can easily break content due to SE having to account for a wider range of possible effective HP pools. Is most players going to have 100k HP? 120k HP? 140k HP? But a 10% mitigation means that the 140k is effectively 154k. And with a shield, it could be worth more than 200k.

For the most part, due to that, you can't buff SCH's mitigation at all. What I would like would be an aetherflow version of adloquium and succor though. SCH is wonderful as an oGCD healer, and for some reason, SCH doesn't have an aetherflow shield? Though that's more of a personal desire than a plea for change.

Now, SCH's problems go beyond simply these three aspects, but they are by far the most important ones. The next section is much more secondary, but I believe would add to the enjoyment of the job. And with Sage arriving, it could give additional differentiation.

To me, SCH has been feeling like there isn't much to do when there isn't much healing to be done. And while it's true that the same could be said for the other healers, back when I first started to play SCH, it wasn't like that. I had lots to do when healing wasn't required. Cleric stance, miasma, bio, bio2, shadow flare, maybe bane, and only then did I start ruin spamming. It was a workout that felt like I was pulling my weight to help beat the enemies.

I understand that we can't go back to that, as it's too complex, but the oversimplification has made any content that didn't involve lots of healing to be boring. Which was basically anything that wasn't raid content, and even then only if most players were close to the minimum iLevel.

This is actually the fault of the holy trinity, and trying to stick to it as closely as SE has been lately. This is also (personally) the cause for some similar problems for tanks, but I'm not familiar enough on that department to give much judgement there.

The solution to any holy trinity problem, when you can't remove the trinity itself, is to simply spread it out. While you can't make anyone but the tank tank, healing and DPS are different. Tanks already have a bit of healing in them, though sometimes it's just in the form of shields, and lots of DPS have their own self heals or even raid-wide mitigations. And everyone does at least a little bit of DPS. In fact, tanks and healers each do more than half as much work as the fully fledged DPS, and hence they theoretically do a third of the raid/party's total damage.

If that's the case, why does it have to be boring for us healers? Throw one dot then spam one ability over and over ad infinitum? Personally, I think that's tiresome, and with Endwalker coming out soon with a new healer, and splitting the healers into pure/shield healers, I think we can further split the healers into simple and complex healers as well.

A simple job is a job with a low skill floor, even for more difficult content. It's easy not only to pick up, but to play proficiently. A complex job on the other hand, while it may or may not be easy to pick up, it is more difficult to play at a high level. But rather than simply meaning that the skill ceiling is higher, it's more like it requires more effort to play at a raid level.

SCH's traditionally been the more difficult to play healer. Initially it was due to the high number of offensive skills with lustrate being a percentage heal that could be used through cleric stance, to later on when SCH had been repeatedly nerfed through expansions to become the undeniably weakest healer, to the point now that SCH's aesthetic appeal now clashes with its mechanical appeal.

The changes above would solve those problems, but it wouldn't make a SCH enjoyable when there isn't any boss mechanics nor any healing to do.

Frankly speaking, I really liked the old triple DoT pattern together with bane to spread the DoTs if you were facing a group, and would take it in an instant if it was an option.

But even if it wasn't, there is one thing I want to point out.

The solution to the drought of tanks and healers, I believe, isn't to simplify their damage rotations as much as possible, as what being distracted by your damage rotation to the point of not doing your role properly is only an issue once you've grown comfortable in the role already. What's driving people away is the fear of not being able to perform the basic role in the first place.

For tanks, that is holding aggro without dying. For healers, that is preventing others from dying.

The insane enmity generation buff is by far more than enough for tanks. Healers too, their healing options have expanded so much that almost all of our old healing spells and abilities are now obsolete.

What's really keeping players from taking up these roles is the fact that they never try. New players that pick a healer/tank at the beginning will stick to them for the most part, so the issue is those who chose DPS first, but shy away from trying tank/healer in the future.

The way to fix that is by forcing them to play as a tank/healer in single player duties. This has already happened on the rare occasion in the MSQ, but if it grew much more frequent, it would ease the fear from these sorts of players I believe.

And if that was true, then why not bring back the complexity of our damage rotation? People easily understand that failing at their damage rotation isn't a big deal, and would prioritize it below proper healing until they grow comfortable with the kit.

Anyways, this post has grown long enough already.

This isn't really some sort of self-important advice to SE or anything, but more of a self-serving release of pent up angst over the current state of SCH, brought on by a friend who I had ranted these same points earlier on, who then suggested I post it.

SCH hasn't gotten a rework despite being one of the original ARR jobs along with DRG and BLM. But of the three, SCH is the only one that had any real problems and in dire need of an overhaul, and it had it from the beginning. Not to mention that much of the skills SCH's gotten in each expansion has been problematic and actively worked against the existing kit. It's clear that SE has no idea what to do with SCH, perhaps due to the fear of fan backlash, but at this point I just wish something was done to fix things.

At this point, we'll at least have Sage to fall back on if SCH ends up breaking even more badly in a rework, though I have a feeling many SCH players will simply jump ship in the hopes that Sage will at least not be a broken job. I know I'll be raising Sage before SCH in EW.

Now, I don't really expect any of these changes to actually happen, but would be happy if at least some people read it, even if it was nothing more than to pass a little bit of time.

Salut!

The way how Scholars Aetherflow is designed, is more of a hindrance on the long run than it does the job any good. It is in a technical sense, no different on how charged skills for others work (like MNK's gapcloser for example). The PvP version of SCH, has the "Aetherflow Skills" adressed in a good way for PvE, all of those skills should have their own charges.

By doing so, it would give SCH some room for rework, especially when the total amount of Healing abilities from Healers get cut down (Healers in this game have far too many of them and the remaining ones recieve potency adjustments/reworks to make up for it.

As SCH currently is, the Job has 8 raw healing abilities, 3 HoT effects and 3 Shields and 7 utility skills of which 4 affect other players, all distributed within a total of 14 Skills, only for Healing purposes which is far too many, considering, that many of said skills are far too similar in effect, which makes the job boring on both paper and gameplay. All that is left, outside of healing, is a total of 5 dps skills.

So what i am getting here is, if you dont need to heal, you got yourself said 5 dps skills and chain stratagem to work with. 4 of 5 dps skills are RAW (insert gordon ramsay here) damaging abilities and that one DoT you have barely gets noticed since that too, is just raw damage and no additional effect.

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Originally Posted by Dearche

I think we can further split the healers into simple and complex healers as well.

A simple job is a job with a low skill floor, even for more difficult content. It's easy not only to pick up, but to play proficiently. A complex job on the other hand, while it may or may not be easy to pick up, it is more difficult to play at a high level. But rather than simply meaning that the skill ceiling is higher, it's more like it requires more effort to play at a raid level.

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"Simple and complex healers"
Oh no. This is "Keep White Mage boring and make Scholar overpowered again" isn't it?

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SCH was one of the few that never got one, and the only one of those that has needed a rework for years.

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Getting whittled down to the point where you have effectively nothing interesting to manage is pretty bad design, isn't it? Scholar is the only remaining healer suffering from this catastrophe. Nobody else has seen such horrible game design for years. Wink wink. Wink wink.

I don't think it needs a complete rework, but it does need thinking about.

IMO the 2.0 design for SCH was fantastic. But there was 1) the perception that it was too weak, 2) shields did not stack so a SCH/SCH set up wasn't entirely great and 3) delay on faerie actions.

I think we just need an evolution of that design but with those 3 things addressed.

The perception that it was weak I think is what brought on what I felt were unnecessary additions to the job that inevitably made it OP and that was its boost to pure healing. So I think we should roll it back a bit again make its pure healing less efficient than its shield healing BUT don't completely nerf if its pure healing, they still need to be able to handle stuff like Living Dead and certain types of Doom.
In addressing the shield stack problem, I think one way this could be addressed is a to add a shield cap over Max HP. Eg if the cap is 40k HP, and the play's Max HP is 120k then the max HP + shields it can have is 160k, but say they drop to 100k, they could have a 60k shield because it doesn't exceed the 160k total. If I recall the reason shield stacking wasn't a thing is because it could mess with mechanics. But the real benefit of shield stacking would be when people's health has dropped and this is where it is kinda gimp.
The delay on faeries actions is an awkward one, and I hate they got rid of Selene's actions. It seems actions queue now, so I think that's fine, there isn't really much of a delay here just a queue, which you can account for, I've not found enough of an issue with how faerie actions work to complain about it (even if lament being able to properly micromanage pets, I know the problem that had and this seems like the compromise). Also modernise Selene, don't delete her.

As for the evolution part, healers now have more emphasis on oGCD's, I think we can shift more shielding onto the oGCD's to help shift some of the older design philosophy into how healers play.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

"Simple and complex healers"
Oh no. This is "Keep White Mage boring and make Scholar overpowered again" isn't it?

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I think having a tiered approach is a good idea, so people who want complexity can have it and the main reason SCH got OP is because its handicap got patched but it was that handicap that stopped it being OP. That handicap made SCH /feel/ weak, when played properly it wasn't weak. Like the perception DRK was always squishy but wasn't when played right.

As for WHM, I think it can be both simple and not boring. I reckon they could steal ideas from BLM's level 50 rotation. I suggested it in another thread but maybe something along the lines of:
Stone IV procs -> It becomes Quake (stronger version of Stone)
Aero II Procs -> It becomes Tornado (delivers total Aero II damage at once)
Dia -> This becomes a debuff (WHM utility), perhaps a defense debuff
Glare -> I thought it could work as a lily dump and build up for Afflatus Misery

It's not complicated but it adds variety straight away. The healing side is already pretty fluid, but I think upgrading the DPS side like that could help break up some of the monotony whilst remaining simple.

And I think then both its healing and DPS would lend to WHM being the "powerful" healer and with SCH retaining a "tactical" healer and maybe AST as a "technical" healer.

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Originally Posted by Saefinn

Glare -> I thought it could work as a lily dump and build up for Afflatus Misery

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I'm going to have to insist that all Blue Lily actions remain heals. We already have trouble valuing them properly as is, adding a damage option that still builds Blood Lily buries the entire system.

But this is a scholar thread so -

I've never liked the pet. There's not been an iteration of it that hasn't annoyed me in some manner, and the continued issues with Scholar and Summoner have only steered me more to "Get rid of them" over the years. So if we're just throwing out what we'd like to see...

As a rough and basic overview, I'd like to see Eos/Selene become passengers rather than be their own entities. They have two basic functions they heed.
A) Follow. Orders a Faerie to attach to a target. By default they are on the scholar's shoulder. Eos provides whoever she's 'following' Embrace, a HoT effect. Selene provides whatever Enemy she's attached to a DoT effect, and will move to the nearest aggro'ed enemy should the current be defeated.
B) Set. Places the Faerie at target location. They extend their default skill to an area at weaker potency. (Eos aoe regens, Selene AoE Dots)

This serves as scholar reimplementation of the old Cleric Stance system. You have Eos out to heal, you have Selene out to deal damage. This also gives us a significant way to improve Dissipation - While the Scholar can swap Faeries by default, Dissipation effectively empowers the opposing Faerie - Locking you out of one for 30s but greatly improving both their, and your, effectiveness.

Example: Eat Eos - Improve your healing capabilities, improve everything sourced from Selene (Usually damage). Eat Selene, improve your damage, improve everything sourced from Eos (Usually healing.)

With this design point in mind, we have a pretty clear goal. We build the Scholar (and faeries) around separate and limited damage/healing kits. When the Scholar is on the offensive, Eos is out to cover. Once the Scholar's offensive options are extinguished, Selene comes out.

We could enforce this via action swapping based on which Faerie is active, but I imagine old scholar mains would much prefer to treat this more as a 'guideline' than a requirement - If you can get away with Selene out and going offensive, that should be an option, just as the ability to turtle up with Eos should be an option.

The introduction of the Fey gauge and Fey Union we'd take a different approach with. Rather than be limited to two abilities, instead the Fey gauge is drained to allow both Faeries to be active at once. Fey Union becomes a cooldown, causing all active faeries to mimic your GCD actions at the chosen target, as weakened and separate effects.

Seraph is now a temporary summon for 30s / 120recast. She grants the ally she follows a Barrier every 6seconds, or applies it to the area she is set at a weaker potency.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

"Simple and complex healers"
Oh no. This is "Keep White Mage boring and make Scholar overpowered again" isn't it?



Getting whittled down to the point where you have effectively nothing interesting to manage is pretty bad design, isn't it? Scholar is the only remaining healer suffering from this catastrophe. Nobody else has seen such horrible game design for years. Wink wink. Wink wink.

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Simple and complex doesn't mean boring vs overpowered, though admittedly it can.
There's actually a perfect example already in FFXIV that does this, and nobody really complains about it. The Casters have RDM as the simple and SMN/BLM as the complex.

What I'm pointing out is that, since we're going to end up with two pure healers and two shield healers, we might as well make one of each a simple, and the other complex.

And if you want an example of how to make WHM simple without being boring, how about if their GCD heals are buffed a bit, and each time they're casted, they give blood lilies? Afflatus Misery would have to be weakened a bit to compensate, and most of their oGCDs would have to be removed, but they'll turn into a slower healer with weaved offence that can be used a ton.

In fact, it would even help solve their boring DPS problems while making them entirely unique in play, all without making WHM newbie unfriendly.

I like these ideas

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Originally Posted by Dearche

Simple and complex doesn't mean boring vs overpowered, though admittedly it can.
There's actually a perfect example already in FFXIV that does this, and nobody really complains about it. The Casters have RDM as the simple and SMN/BLM as the complex.

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Unless you're min maxing BLM is ridiculously simple as well.

Sch needs to be detached from arcanist for good. They need to stop talking about it and be about it. Aetherflow needs to go. Something needs to be done about pet responsiveness. Though, Yoshi said summoner is getting some rework and I’m sure it’s about pets and that will tinkle down to scholar too since it’s a pet job. Scholar will get a rework I’m hoping anyway. This current shadowbringers iteration of it absolutely sucks.

If we can have jobs without party utility like BLM and SAM that ditch out high dps, we cam have Helaers without party utility that ditch out high dps.

Sage seems to be going the route of "Selfish" dps with shields.

Having WHM be the selfish dps with regen/pure heals seems perfectly plausible.

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Originally Posted by GrimGale

If we can have jobs without party utility like BLM and SAM that ditch out high dps, we cam have Helaers without party utility that ditch out high dps.

Sage seems to be going the route of "Selfish" dps with shields.

Having WHM be the selfish dps with regen/pure heals seems perfectly plausible.

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I agree this could work. The community would have to be okay with it in order to make it work.

The beginning of Shadowbringers doesn't give me much hope in that vein. Remember the AST/SCH threads baying for blood demanding the "overpowered" WHM get its personal damage nerfed because it was tooooooooo stroooooooong? The DPS seem content with their relative pecking order within their subroles. I have never not seen SCHs flip their lids when WHM gets to do significantly more damage than them. Because Scholar is "supposed" to be "the DPS healer". That's a perception that would need to change for it to work. Scholar can't be "the DPS healer" AND "the utility-rich healer" AND "the smart healer" etc etc etc. One of the major beefs I've had with Scholar as a job over past expansions is that community perception sort of hogged up all of the identity space due to being good at everything; it lead to a lot of "well you can't do this to improve WHM, that would be stealing SCH's identity!".

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

One of the major beefs I've had with Scholar as a job over past expansions is that community perception sort of hogged up all of the identity space due to being good at everything; it lead to a lot of "well you can't do this to improve WHM, that would be stealing SCH's identity!"

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I agree with this beef. WHM's overall design also makes it the 'correct' job to be the high personal DPS healer, due to its obvious parallels to BLM with how its DPS rotation is almost purely GCD requiring every cast to come with commitment, while SCH is running around with a lot of weaving mobility, a variant of our GCD that can be used on the run, and a 'co-healer' who keeps up some maintenance heals even while we are DPSing as a key part of our identity that can't be removed when reworking oGCD healing.

Obviously, when you look at that, either the WHM needs to bring some ridiculous party utility, or it needs to do a LOT more DPS than the SCH to make sense. And because we don't want WHMs doing more DPS than dancers, its clear SCH's damage as part of its identity is.... 'wrong.'

A more complex offensive rotation can be part of its identity, or strong toolbox heals that let it spend more time DPSing, and I think the job should definitely be very 'active,' but that really shouldn't translate to potency.

The big issue, of course, is that a lot of nuance between the healers is lost in the current healing system. So small DPS gains on each other makes them the 'best' as well as the fact its much easier to 'enforce' a meta because you can, in fact, just switch to WHM from SCH with a day or two of practice and grinding, compared to making your RDM go SAM or SMN or whatever.

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Originally Posted by SweetPete

Sch needs to be detached from arcanist for good

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I agree with this. I don't really see why it's so difficult to do either. Just make SCH a classless job like all the newer jobs, and for those people who already has SCH unlocked, just make sure that they have the new SCH at the same level.

Maybe there's some sort of internal coding which prevents this, but I wish that SE would simply admit that if that was the case. Then we wouldn't be so frustrated about it.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

I agree this could work. The community would have to be okay with it in order to make it work...

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To be honest, this is entirely SE's fault though. Admittedly, it was originally caused by the complaints of dual SCH in DF, but SE's solution was to give big raw heals to SCH, rather than find some other sort of solution.

Being the DPS healer was just happenstance due to SCH's origins as ACN, but that didn't mean that the best solution was to just nerf SCH's damage. It wasn't like they were out DPSing the actual DPS (at least when they were equally skilled). Utility on the other hand could easily be shared. AST became the utility healer the moment it showed up, as it was part of its core identity. Any complaint regarding that only started when chain stratagem was introduced, and even then it was only one skill that wasn't connected to any SCH abilities, just the lore. And the idea of a unique preventative healer was destroyed as WHM got even better mitigation than SCH and a nice shield on top of that.

The only real identity SCH has left is being the broken pet healer.

Admittedly, if SE's real goal in ShB was to wipe out the existing preconceptions by wiping out any real identity and enjoyability of the healers before they actually fix things from a fresh plate in EW, then I would admit things might be worth it. But if that's true, then the changes we get better be REAL good to make up for these two years of tedium and anger, as SE'll have to earn back all the healers that gave up and quit to DPS.

Personally, I enjoy DRG, BLM, and SMN way more than playing SCH lately, and my persistence in my first love doesn't pay out in EW, I'm going to jump ship to being a DPS main from now on.

WHM doesn't even need to have ridiculous dps compared to the other two, but what gets to me most is how WHM is the least capable of healing while doing dps. As a WHM you don't get both, you pick one or the other. SCH suffers heal tax too, but can output a fairly decent hps without suffering too much loss. AST pays no heal tax at all. WHM however kills its heal output just to barely keep up with the other two on dps. Assize is blown on cd for damage, lilies are for movement or intermissions, your oGCD's rely on very limited weave windows and GCD heals are a 300 loss.

If WHM is going to be the 0 utility healer, it should be churning out both competitive dps and healing. AST does both easily and has utility. Currently WHM functions because AST carries it and SCH isn't everyone's cup of tea, but once we divide into shield/pure and WHM is competing directly with AST for one of two "Pure" spots, it's in trouble unless things really change. Why bring a healer that does one of two things and can't do the third when you have a healer that does all 3 simultaneously.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

Scholar is "supposed" to be "the DPS healer". That's a perception that would need to change for it to work. Scholar can't be "the DPS healer" AND "the utility-rich healer" AND "the smart healer" etc etc etc. One of the major beefs I've had with Scholar as a job over past expansions is that community perception sort of hogged up all of the identity space due to being good at everything; it lead to a lot of "well you can't do this to improve WHM, that would be stealing SCH's identity!".

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SCH imo was basically the proactive utility dps. It wasn't about healing damage it was about preventing it. So in this guise it wasn't a healer at all. You has has fairy that could do some reactive healing when needed. And a fairy that was more utility and support.

The biggest problem with being proactive though is that's its ultimately far to punishing.. if you don't absolutely 100% know a fight script your done for. If you cast a shield the exact millisecond you see the cast bar going g off for a tank buster or raid wide. It's already too late to mitigate that damage.

This is where people complained that noct ast was superior with its insta cast Shields. Slightly weaker but infinitely more usable and effective. Though at one point I think they were even stronger than a school Shields.

Scholars were never meant to be reactive healers and thats why they gave them emergency tactics as a kind of oh crap button that could convert shields into raw heals in a pinch.. but they kinda killed that before they even implemented it by giving us indomnibility as well...

As for utility in general they've gutted and simplified so much that there's really no room to be unique and offer much by way of utility... resource management is all but gone. Crowd control is non existent... mitigation in general has become a joke.. the only thing utility can do is just make dps numbers bigger.. like how every set card now does the exact same thing.

Ast had some great potential andnits cards would have fine if some of them weren't deliberately restricted. Like Ewer my refresh but doesn't work on a blackmage or a dark Knight.... what the hell? That could have been interesting. Letting blms bust out an extra fire 4 or 2 or drk uses there arts more.. could have been a good card. And not just fodder for balance spreads.

Old school scholar fey wind was pretty good to. Serene was often a decent choice for that. And her aoe cleanse could have worked much better if devuffs actually lasted longer than 4 seconds. Someones paralysed. No point casting leeches or esuna as it'll have wear off in a couple of seconds anyway.

It was never meant to be the reactive style healer so there's the big gap in its identity. It was meant to prevent damage not heal it.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

WHM doesn't even need to have ridiculous dps compared to the other two, but what gets to me most is how WHM is the least capable of healing while doing dps. As a WHM you don't get both, you pick one or the other. SCH suffers heal tax too, but can output a fairly decent hps without suffering too much loss. AST pays no heal tax at all. WHM however kills its heal output just to barely keep up with the other two on dps. Assize is blown on cd for damage, lilies are for movement or intermissions, your oGCD's rely on very limited weave windows and GCD heals are a 300 loss.

If WHM is going to be the 0 utility healer, it should be churning out both competitive dps and healing. AST does both easily and has utility. Currently WHM functions because AST carries it and SCH isn't everyone's cup of tea, but once we divide into shield/pure and WHM is competing directly with AST for one of two "Pure" spots, it's in trouble unless things really change. Why bring a healer that does one of two things and can't do the third when you have a healer that does all 3 simultaneously.

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I completely agree. One of the myriad reasons WHM has traditionally fallen so far behind after an expansion gets past its first major patch or two (obscene overbuffs to the competition aside) is that its personal damage is so rough to upkeep compared to the other two. If we're aiming at a landscape like the caster DPS, where you have the utility-heavy casters doing less personal damage than BLM but bringing raid buffs to (mostly) make up for it, it's harder to get working just because of the way that AST and SCH's healing/damage kits aren't mutually exclusive. It doesn't matter if SCH does *slightly* less personal damage than WHM against a training dummy, because SCH is just head and shoulders more capable of keeping the blasting rolling while making sure the the party stays alive. Add utility on top of that, and the healer that has to eat into their healing commitment time to do damage stands no chance of keeping up with the wonder twins.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

I completely agree. One of the myriad reasons WHM has traditionally fallen so far behind after an expansion gets past its first major patch or two (obscene overbuffs to the competition aside) is that its personal damage is so rough to upkeep compared to the other two. If we're aiming at a landscape like the caster DPS, where you have the utility-heavy casters doing less personal damage than BLM but bringing raid buffs to (mostly) make up for it, it's harder to get working just because of the way that AST and SCH's healing/damage kits aren't mutually exclusive. It doesn't matter if SCH does *slightly* less personal damage than WHM against a training dummy, because SCH is just head and shoulders more capable of keeping the blasting rolling while making sure the the party stays alive. Add utility on top of that, and the healer that has to eat into their healing commitment time to do damage stands no chance of keeping up with the wonder twins.

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It was really sad to watch how quickly WHM got outperformed once again by SCH.
The first tier, AST/ WHM was great and SCH was the red-headed stepchild. After that it only went downhill. The only boss where even AST/ WHM comps playing at average level pulled ahead was e6s because of the extremely low healing requirement coupled with frequent transitions for lily dumps and the low movement requirement.
But the healing potential SCH has is completely bonkers; they have so many tools to deal with all kinds of situations that they will not suffer a signifcant dps loss unless a party is really, really bad. WHM suffers in anything but perfectly coordinated parties even with an AST as co heal.
And with lilies having to be used for weaving, movement and healing, competing for 3 different functions and all with different timings, while being on a 30s cooldown, what good a are a few hundrep dps more on paper? The moment a WHM cannot freely use lilies as movement and weaving tools and having to hold them back for healing, they fall behind big time. Then they get to chose between being Ser Clip-a-lot and Ser Medica Spammer or (more likely) a lot of both.
Even in coordinated parties I felt like I was griefing my co heal no matter how well I tried to time my movement lilies with healing.

Right now it's not a choice between "take a team of two healers with high healing potential for safety" and "take a team with less healing potential but good dps if you feel brave". You get both by ditching WHM. It could very well be the high risk/ high reward healer but that probably goes against SE goal of making it the beginner-friendly healer. Even risks that only become apparent in endgame content are probably not acceptable in SEs book.

A few things I'd like to see for SCH are:
- an option to turn Succor/ Adlo into a full shield, similiar to ET and on a low CD aswell
- make the next 3 AF skills crit after Dissipation, maybe let the heal bonus affect oGCDs aswell, because right now the skill is pretty lackluster, boring and mostly an optimization tool
- Aetherpact and Fey Blessing can still be used when Seraph is summoned, because it's supposed to be an overall stronger version of the fairy, not a limited one
- fairy always remembers the position it got placed. Seriously, the frequent repositioning is annoying and costs valuable time until you can use the fairy skills effectively again
- fix ghosting. Enough said.

But for the fairy itself I pretty much lost all hope unless they reverse the change made to fairy skills. But not having them as oGCDs would make SCHs free heal explode and would require signifcant rebalancing, escpecially for WHM. Pretty sure that's not going to happen.

Dissipation just plain needs to disappear. The only use I ever saw with it was to let you spam more drains. All the actually good heals SCH got has CDs long enough that dissipation wasn't useful.

I'm sure that SE's intent was to have a 30s mega heal phase since it gave your GCD heals a buff, but the damn thing is way overkill. At most, you only need about two GCDs to heal the entire party to about two thirds from 1HP, and the SCH just plain loses steam at that point due to the CDs. And that presumes that SCH is solo healing, which runs counter to both encounter and job design.

Nobody at SE thinks shield healers should be able to solo heal True Living Dead on its own even on casual, yet SCH can get pretty close. Why should SCH get a skill that pushes their healing even further up then? And for 30s? What a waste. You can only justify it at ten seconds, but then you're sitting on so much extra aetherflow that all you can do is either throw it into lustrate so that you can make sure that you never have to do any GCD heals during a fight, or you pump it all into Energy Drain, something SE doesn't even want SCH to do, looking at how they removed it once and nerfed it hard recently.

Personally, making Indom or Excog the capstone skill is good enough if that's the real reason why Dissipation still exists. At least it's a skill we use on a regular basis, and they really boosts SCH's healing capacity, even if it runs counter to the very definition of a shield healer.