Become Scholar without Arcanist.

Hi everyone! :D

This is my first post on these forums, I was told by support that my idea/request would be best placed here so I also wondered other people's views on this matter.

So, I was wondering/requesting if we would ever be able to be Scholar without having to start as Arcanist first?

In all games and MMOs I play the healer role/class and have followed suit here starting as a Conjurer with a wish to have all and only the healer jobs unlocked and playable. I suffer from OCD, without getting too deeply into that, but to then get Scholar and complete the list of healers in this game would also cause my Character Profile to have Arcanist/Summoner displayed on there which would cause me a lot of discomfort.

I understand this may seem bizarre or petty to a lot of you, I'm just curious if there could ever be a workaround or if it would ever be implemented :o

If anything is decoupled from arcanist, it should be summoner. Thematically and in terms of their story summoner is a bit of a third wheel.

Unlikely to ever happen; SE doesn't like to touch the classes themselves much and hasn't removed Scholar from Arcanist despite reworking Arcanist completely, likely due to some coding issue or lack of an interest in creating another class for Scholar to have instead.
As it stands, your only option is to avoid getting Scholar.

Before 6.0, I'd have argued for SMN to become the 'standalone, pick up at level 30' job. AFAIK the only prerequisite lorewise to 'being a summoner' is to have been bathed in a primal's aether at the moment of it's demise, which is a very specific set of conditions, hence there being so few people capable of being one. Getting to level 30, and completing 'Sylph Management' (the requirements to upgrade to a job), requires you have beaten Ifrit, so you'd have fulfilled the 'conditions' already. Just lock Titan and Garuda Egi quests behind 'you must have defeated this primal to take the next quest', job done.

Now contrast the lore stuff of SMN to SCH, which requires a mind suited to tactics, adaptability, good at logic, reasoning and mathematics, and you can see why ACN>SCH was the more natural path to follow as the 'upgrade'. Plus, it'd allow them to retool ACN into a healer class, allowing players who get into the game with the mindset of 'I want to play a healer' a second choice, instead of forcing them to play just CNJ, or forcing them to play a DPS for 30 levels, then weirdly swap to a healer several hours in.

Now they've gone back and reworked how ACN plays to be more like new-SMN, I can't see them doing any kind of split. IDK what their plan is, at this point I assume it's a case of 'sod it, it works as it is, and we can't be arsed to change it', so SMN and SCH will be forever tied together I think. If the 6.0 rework to SMN wasn't enough of a chance for them to finally sort it all out, nothing will be

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Nizzi

Unlikely to ever happen; SE doesn't like to touch the classes themselves much and hasn't removed Scholar from Arcanist despite reworking Arcanist completely, likely due to some coding issue or lack of an interest in creating another class for Scholar to have instead.
As it stands, your only option is to avoid getting Scholar.

---

There are no serious coding issues to consider here. It should be as simple as either (a) removing the base class flag from SCH or (b) copying SCH to a new job that has no base class. The rest is easy run-once administrative stuff such as setting each character's SCH level to their ACN level and SCH xp to their ACN xp to grandfather in anyone who currently has ACN leveled past 30, and maybe batch adjusting the equip flag on all SCH gear to the new SCH job ID if it changed because option B (probably wouldn't though).

Decoupling SCH from ACN should be so easy that the most likely explanation as to why they haven't already done it is that they don't want to deal with people complaining that they no longer get a twofer. I say just make all the new characters level SMN and SCH separately and ignore the complaints, but then the devs are much nicer than I am.

Thank you for this, its satisfying to know that it's not too much trouble for them to be able to do it. I've just got to hope they do it some day

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by fulminating

If anything is decoupled from arcanist, it should be summoner. Thematically and in terms of their story summoner is a bit of a third wheel.

---

Tbh, it would have to be SCH that's decoupled. Arcanist is a DPS, SMN is a DPS, SCH is a healer. Plus if you look at all of the old Arcanist abilities, it now looks almost identical to SMN's skill list, while SCH's is vastly different.

SCH was so much cooler when it had poison based dps abilities though--the SCH in 4.0 was my favorite job/class ever in any game. I absolutely loved it.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

Tbh, it would have to be SCH that's decoupled. Arcanist is a DPS, SMN is a DPS, SCH is a healer. Plus if you look at all of the old Arcanist abilities, it now looks almost identical to SMN's skill list, while SCH's is vastly different.

---

Yeah, they could have decoupled SCH from ARC, at this point the only similarities they have are both wielding a book and having pets, but like you mentioned the rest is different. Might as well do this for a better structure of jobs (one trick healer alts and all that).

I mean, level 90 Summoners still use Carbuncle, who is distinctly an Arcanist summon. Scholars, however, can only summon fairies.

So when it comes to deciding which one should stick with Arcanist and which one should go it’s own way…I know what I’d go for lol

A cynical individual would inform you that the only reason summoner retains carbuncle is that there’s a significant number of carbuncle-branded items.
Scholar was generally dots and pets, summoner pets and dots. Now neither’s either.

With pvp being the only part of the game where jobs are permitted any identity, and bane being the arcanist capstone skill, it’s clear that summoner is less tied in. Not to mention that new summoner may as well be given out by that stupid rabbit during the spaceship sequence in endwalker for how little it fits into the rest of the game.

Summoner retains carbuncle from a lore perspective because Egi and Carbuncles are similar constructs. Likewise, from a lore perspective, Sch does not because Lily is her own living thing and not something constructed by the Scholar. Once again, with lore, the mere act of summoning and many spells used by Summoner require many on the spot calculations and math: that's why you're writing in your book when you summon. Gameplay wise, Arcanist and Summoner are exactly the same, while Scholar is the third wheel. In addition to that, Scholar currently shares a single action with Arcanist, which will be 0 if SE has their way: Resurrection.
You may want Scholar to be the one that goes on its own, but neither game play nor lore support such a thing.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kimmay

Summoner retains carbuncle from a lore perspective because Egi and Carbuncles are similar constructs. Likewise, from a lore perspective, Sch does not because Lily is her own living thing and not something constructed by the Scholar.

---

No, the faeries are aetheric constructs.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Surito Carito, "The Chase"

Normally, when scholars summon their faeries, they do so by extracting a portion of the aether circulating through their body and willing it to take shape.

By releasing that form, they can then dismiss it, and the aether will flow back into their bodies.

---

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Rongway

No, the faeries are aetheric constructs.

---

According to SE's own Encyclopedia Eorzea:
"In answer to the demands of their new positions, Nymian mages learned to bind and control faeries that they might entrust the otherworldly creatures with a share of the restorative duties."
"With soul crystals providing an anchor for their existence, these otherworldly servants are made manifest ..."
meaning that we are pulling the faeries from some other place, and they exist on their own. Whereas egis:
"'Egi' is the name given to the conjured avatars of a summoner. Only a practitioner whose aether has been stained by the essence of a primal can thenceforth shape her own energies into a willful embodiment of the original entity's dominant aspect."
An egi, like a carbuncle, is not some being called forth from another world, but our own aether given a shape of our choosing. Which is why /egiglamour exists within lore.

I wish they could/would decouple Scholar from Arcanist or Summoner from Arcanist if for nothing else so that there can be a second option for new players when it comes to healing. It really isn't intuitive that you need to play a DPS class to unlock a healer at level 30.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kimmay

According to SE's own Encyclopedia Eorzea:
"In answer to the demands of their new positions, Nymian mages learned to bind and control faeries that they might entrust the otherworldly creatures with a share of the restorative duties."
"With soul crystals providing an anchor for their existence, these otherworldly servants are made manifest ..."
meaning that we are pulling the faeries from some other place, and they exist on their own. Whereas egis:
"'Egi' is the name given to the conjured avatars of a summoner. Only a practitioner whose aether has been stained by the essence of a primal can thenceforth shape her own energies into a willful embodiment of the original entity's dominant aspect."
An egi, like a carbuncle, is not some being called forth from another world, but our own aether given a shape of our choosing. Which is why /egiglamour exists within lore.

---

Isn't EE stated to be 'from the POV of a learned person who is living in Eorzea', and therefore might have holes in the explanations? Like, the explanation of Astral and Umbral might not be completely accurate to what we now know, because EE1 was released before SHB further explained how they correlate to Light and Dark, stuff like that. So it could be inferred that an in-universe scholar (the clever people not the job) might surmise that the fairy is from a different plane, and that we summon them here from that plane due to it's persistent conscious between summonings, but we now also know that Primals can keep memories between summonings (eg, Nidhogg remembers on the Steps of Faith that you're the one that beat him in the Aery), so it's possible that this 'scholar writing EE' is slightly incorrect

Also lore can be bent whenever needed to suit the narrative or gameplay. We did it with Male Miqote, we did it with Male Viera, I don't see why it couldn't be done with something as small as 'the exact nature of how a SCH summons their fairy' if it has to be done to give players something they want like idk a way to turn Seraph into Feo Ul with a '/fairyglamour' command. Actually, if the EE is right and fairies ARE from a different plane, and the jobstone is the 'anchor' to draw them here, doesn't that mean it's 100% within canon that we SHOULD be able to summon Feo Ul? They're 'from a different plane', have a 'bond' with us that lets them send messages to and from the Source in our place, and even created a smaller copy of themselves to accompany us while their 'main body' stayed in the castle. Meanwhile, Seraph is just... there? I don't own a copy of EE but I assume the lore on Seraph is pretty sparse

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Amenara

I wish they could/would decouple Scholar from Arcanist or Summoner from Arcanist if for nothing else so that there can be a second option for new players when it comes to healing. It really isn't intuitive that you need to play a DPS class to unlock a healer at level 30.

---

Yeah I also feel this would be a nice extra benefit. If they had it start from level 1 rather than say 30 like Astrologian it would give new players the option between Conjurer or Scholar for healing. I’m just really hopeful they do implement a way to have them split

For Miqote and Viera there are no lore issues. The player character isn't the world, but a special individual. If players had to follow the lore, then only a single person on the data center could ever be Whm at any given time. We are supposed to ignore lore for such things.
As for Seraph, the encyclopedia implies that she is the true form of Lily. That the Scholar summons the fairy, and when she spreads her wings everyone is suddenly consoled (looking at you Consolation). And for a pact with Feo Ul, there's no lore reason that we shouldn't be able to. Especially considering that we technically haven't made a pact with a fairy ourselves, but are using someone else's

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kimmay

For Miqote and Viera... And for a pact with Feo Ul, there's no lore reason that we shouldn't be able to. Especially considering that we technically haven't made a pact with a fairy ourselves, but are using someone else's

---

Pretty much agreed on all points.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Amenara

I wish they could/would decouple Scholar from Arcanist or Summoner from Arcanist if for nothing else so that there can be a second option for new players when it comes to healing. It really isn't intuitive that you need to play a DPS class to unlock a healer at level 30.

---

Is this really true?

I mean, maybe for a person that FFXIV is the first RPG they ever play, but I knew how they all worked when I started, and that was back in ARR when you had to have sub-classes leveled.

For my part, I don't want them decoupled. I like both SCH and SMN and having to level them apart would just be more annoying for no benefit. There's very little to gain from it. Besides, if they decoupled them, the way it would go is ACN would lead into SMN and SCH would just be a Job you can unlock at level 30 and which starts at level 30, the same way RDM/SAM work at level 50. They aren't going to make a new class for SCH to start at level 1 like ROG/NIN because they don't want to make more Classes and there's literally no reason or benefit to making a new one JUST so SCH can have one that is going to compel them to do so at this point, since most people know how it works and most people treat the first 30 levels as something that just flies by anyway.

The arguments above kind of show why ACN would continue to be linked to SMN (rather than SMN being the separate Job that starts at 30 by itself), as does how they're treated in game. Notice all the SMN weapons are ACN/SMN while the SCH ones are just SCH. Same with all the Healer gear vs Caster gear. Then open Actions & Traits on SCH. Notice you only inherit ONE ability from ACN, which is Resurrection? Despite SMN's not scaling with INT, SCH doesn't even get Physic from ACN, it has its own that just shares icon and name but is coded differently in the database.

They also JUST remade ACN so it would streamline into SMN, so they're unlikely to split the two now.

And finally, we all know that DPS are the favored child of SE/Devs/Yoshi P - everyone jokes/memes about it all the time. Who really thinks they'll be taking something away from the Red Icon crew?

Right now, it's a little awkward, but you also get two Jobs for the price of one leveling run, which a lot of people really like.

IF they changed it, all it would do is make SCH a separate Job that starts at 30, so it wouldn't benefit level 1 first time RPG player anyway, even if we ignore lore and everything else.

EDIT: At this point in time, it would probably be easier for them to just make AST start in Gridania (that's where the quests for it start at level 30 anyway) and go the route of making it a starting class (except it would be a Job already) instead. Which would...still be weird.