Scholar Lore issues..?

Hello! So I love Scholar, it's my favourite job and yet it seems that with each update different pieces of the lore seems to break, as a newer player I've found it incredibly confusing to invest myself with this job due to this...

For example: Within the Scholar questline Eos and Selene are described as having seperate powers and yet within the game Selene not only dosent exist but is merely a glamour for Eos!

Alongside that within Encyclopedia Eorzea it mentions a spell called Leeches that seems to function as an Esuna and yet it has been removed (not even a flavour version of esuna and yet each job as one for a Raise)

Is Seraph meant to be Lily? I don't understand why it wasnt called Lily when summoned it just dosent make sense, not only that but it dosent look like it captures a middleground of Eos and Selene (Sunlight and Moonlight) and is instead just reflective effects...

Why is Scholar the only job to not retain a single skill from its previous job aside from Resurrection? Arcanist and Scholar are almost two different jobs and not an evolution at all (I was sold on the idea of a DPS becoming a healer)

Am I just petty, I really want to invest deeply into this game but so many things just irk me, Energy Drain on scholar and summoner do the exact opposite with one giving aether and the other using it, Why does Scholar have Ruin II? A spell thats naming convention was removed by the time Heavensward starts!

Sorry for my little spiel, I just was curious if anyone else cared about the lore here and if there were alterations that I'd missed!

I’m not a ‘lore expert’ but I’ll try to answer as best I can.

Eos and Selene used to be separate pets with different unique abilities. However it’s also made clear that they aren’t two separate entities, simply two different manifestations of the same entity. The change to delete Scholar’s Summon II and turn her into a glamour was only in the most recent patch (more or less), and they don’t generally adjust lore when it becomes detached from the gameplay (i.e Astrologian cards all do the same thing despite quest dialogue specifically saying they have unique effects)z

Following from that, Seraph’s true ‘identity’ isn’t exactly clear. From what I understand, I think Seraph is the true ‘entity’ which Eos and Selene comprise. That is to say, they’re two halves of a whole, and when you squish them together, you get Seraph. But there’s no official lore to confirm to deny that theory (as far as I’m aware).

Scholar’s separation/non-separation from Arcanist is a tricky one which goes back to even before 2.0. They needed a new healer (otherwise it’d only have been White Mage), but they’d also spent a ton of time/resources and were running thin on both. So they decided to try having their newly added job as a ‘branching’ job that could go into either Summoner or Scholar. The problem was, because those jobs had a shared base, it made balancing the two extremely difficult. Either Scholar ended up being affected by Summoner changes, or vice-versa.

Then there was the difficulty of them having to deal with essentially two different spell sets squished into the one job. The result was Scholar ending up with a bunch of DoTs that were meant for Summoner, and Summoner ended up with a bunch of utility like Eye for an Eye and Physick (which still scales off mind even though Summoner uses int lol), and Resurrection.

As a result, they decided to simply separate the jobs toolkits as much as they possibly could. But because of ‘netcode’ or whatever, it’s simply not possible for them to remove
Arcanist as a base class from either Summoner or Scholar, which is why we still some of these relics (like the aforementioned Summoner Physick)

Scholar is a little funky in some ways, mostly relating to the fact a lot of its base at-launch ideas sorta flopped. The idea of 'maybe we do two jobs off of a base class' turned out to be a bad one for largely the reasons Connor said, as was the Eos/Selene split; the intention was that Eos was more focused on healing and Selene more focused on non-healing support, but over time the stuff Selene specialized at just... didn't really work out, so Selene basically just became a trap choice, only being used by people who weren't in the know about the game's meta. (While I wish the game did develop in a way that stuff like Selene worked, because I like non-healing support, the devs are good at realizing that sometimes their ideas just didn't pan out and shouldn't be stuck to.) She went to 'separate but identical button' in Shadowbringers until becoming a glamor in an Endwalker patch.

Leeches was a somewhat similar victim; it was just Scholar's Esuna, but once they implemented role abilities in Stormblood (as a replacement for cross-class skills, which were also a bad idea) it was removed and Esuna made into a role ability because that just made more sense. I believe AST had a similar 'basically Esuna' spell, but I wasn't playing AST in Heavensward.

The game's lore is mostly solid, but you do see some funky stuff when you look at early jobs that have gotten some level of retooling over the years, so abilities that used to have some lore-based weight now just... don't exist in that form. Another example there is AST, which used to have time magic as a big tentpole of its skillset but just doesn't anymore, so there's some fluff about it but every time you get taught a spell it just veers away from that. My read from the fact Eos and Selene still have that in-story distinction is that in-universe, they do still have that split in specialties, it's just not really useful to us that they do.

EDIT: Incidentally, I should say that I think the fact that job lore stays the same even if the job doesn't is a positive for the game. Look at it from the perspective of someone who roleplays as their job; they rarely rerun that job story (and for a long period of the game didn't have the ability to), so it's helpful to them that what they've built their roleplaying around didn't change on a story level, even if the job did. If you made Selene a significant part of your character's identity for some reason, you didn't have to throw it all out.

Leeches was replaced by Esuna for balance reasons. Since Scholar evolves from a DPS class instead of a healing one is it has no low level healing spells besides Physick and pet abilities. EVERYTHING else is learned at 30+. That led to problems when you were trying to do dungeon like Toto-rak and Brayflox but couldn't cure poisons until level 40. Leeches was removes and replaced with Esuna as a role action to fix that issue.

Off topic, but Astrologian’s Esuna was called Exalted Detriment, and was removed for the same reason as Scholar’s Leeches. It was also to do with the introduction of the role skill system that created standardised abilities for one’s that used to have different animations but identical effects (i.e Esuna, Rampart)

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Originally Posted by Brightamethyst

Leeches was replaced by Esuna for balance reasons. Since Scholar evolves from a DPS class instead of a healing one is it has no low level healing spells besides Physick and pet abilities. EVERYTHING else is learned at 30+. That led to problems when you were trying to do dungeon like Toto-rak and Brayflox but couldn't cure poisons until level 40. Leeches was removes and replaced with Esuna as a role action to fix that issue.

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If that was the case at the time, it seems to no longer be the case now. Scholar has multiple "Scholar-only" spells available before level 30; looking at the job guide, the only spell that is an Arcanist spell rather than a Scholar spell is Resurrection at level 12. Even Ruin (level 1) and Physick (level 4) are Scholar spells, not Arcanist spells.

It was indeed the case at the time. The Job Stones worked by giving you new spells after level 30, exactly one new skill every 5 levels, so SMN and SCH shared the exact same skillset until lvl 30 and even then, they shared ACN skills up until 50, this meant that SCH shared Ruin 1 and 2 and both levels of Bio and Miasma, which incidentally made SCH the more "DPS-oriented" healer, SMN still has Physick I don't know if you mean SCH gets a Scholar-only version or something because I haven't seen SCH's skillset in a while (it was certainly useless for SMN since HW, because it scales off MND and not INT), I'd guess they made SCH Ruin also scale off MND instead of INT for SMN with the removal of Cleric Stance.

Yes, this indeed created a huge problem when one of your healer jobs couldn't use any of its actual healing skills bar Physick pre-Haukke Manor, and meant you had to be spamming Physick in Brayflox due to the boss's undodgeable poison DoT. However, the fairy is otherwise so OP in that content that a SCH didn't really need to HEAL because the fairy would take care of everything. (another fun tidbit was that Cleric Stance swapped your MND and INT attributes, and your fairy's heals were based on your MND at the time of summoning, so you could summon her without CS, then turn it on and DPS, and she wouldn't be affected; however, summon her with CS ON and you'd nerf her heals for no reason)

So, yes, SCH was kind of a mess in ARR up to ShB because of the Job System and being the only job that shares the same base class, while also being the only job that's a whole different ROLE than its base class.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

Specifics on Selene

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Initially Selene's abilities were an AOE Esuna, a Silence, and a buff that specifically increased Spell Speed of the whole party by something like 20%. It was like this up into HW, and the Spell speed buff was changed to 3% haste in Stormblood.

All in all, this made early Selene use quite good for mage comps and BLM boosting. The silence also allowed SCH to take the role of interrupting, allowing DPSes to use their then DPS tied interrupts for DPS rather than for holding for interrupts, and the AOE Esuna was just more or less an oh shit button/icing on the cake (really useful for Thordan Ex PUGs screwing up paralysis towers). This somewhat meant that Eos was the raid prog fairy, as her abilities revolve around AOE heals and damage mitigation instead, and Selene was the DPS fairy.

The SCH has the ability to switch between them at any time (MP issues notwithstanding), though the skills do share cooldowns, so to play optimally you use both. But most folks just default to Eos, because she heals and Scholar is a healer!

My guess is they gutted Selene because balancing the haste buff on top of Chain Stratagem was more than the devs wanted to do, mixed with the same reasoning they got rid of Heavy Thrust from DRG. "Most players don't use it, in spite of it being for optimal performance, so we'll just get rid of it and raise the skill floor!"

The AoE Esuna was also fantastic for WAR tanks because Selene would instantly cure Berserk pacify (assuming Fey Caress was off CD.)

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Originally Posted by Vyrerus

Initially Selene's abilities were an AOE Esuna, a Silence, and a buff that specifically increased Spell Speed of the whole party by something like 20%. It was like this up into HW, and the Spell speed buff was changed to 3% haste in Stormblood.

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Thanks for the confirmation on this one; I did play Scholar back in Heavensward and Stormblood, but even back then I knew that Selene was a trap choice at best and 'min-max for a slight DPS boost that is most likely not worth it' at most, so I didn't exactly use her much.

Selene's kit was definitely a pile of 'things the developers realized were a balancing nightmare'. Selene's spell speed/haste buff was pretty undertuned, but haste buffs themselves proved to be a terrible idea to include (AST suffered from that too--or rather, AST's melee DPS teammates did), and an AoE Esuna turned out to be the nemesis of every mechanic designed around Esuna because one job was just objectively way better at dealing with them. And on the other side, Silence was basically worthless the entire time Selene had it, because if they ever made it strong it would be game-breaking. And all that is of course coupled with the headaches that came from the pet AI being pretty awful and prone to missing commands, which was its own pile of issues.

Honestly, a lot of pre-Shadowbringers Scholar suffered from the same thing; it was just this game's absolute embodiment of 'it seemed like a good idea at the time, but it turns out it wasn't'. Would I like to play a game where pre-ShB Scholar could reach its full potential without breaking the game by every definition of 'break'? Yes, I probably would, but that's just not the game we got.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

Dunking on poor Selene

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Q.Q But she wore thigh highs, Cleretic. THIGH HIGHS!

I'm pretty sure the nerf to Selene's spell speed buff was so they didn't have to worry about a mage meta happening and pushing melees out again, as had somewhat happened in ARR with loads of groups totally opting out of using DRG or MNK for Binding Coil due to the sheer advantage of BRD, BLM, and SMN having things that overlapped far better while also being able to play with impunity due to most boss AOEs being designed to punish ceaseless melee. In HW I guess they hadn't really decided on a direction/the retunes to melee had made them more than a match for any mage comp.

So in Stormblood they opted to make it a flat DPS increase by itself, but one that could be used to ensure more consistent burst windows for all members of the party. Something kind of ignored/misread/not cared about at the time, what with BLM and SAM competing for top DPS rawdog dat parse, having no raid buffs and caring way more about the ultra potent AST cards (RIP all of you kings, except you, Spire. Also RIP Stella, but that's beyond the scope of this tangent).

Silence from Selene was great for:

Silencing ADS in Binding Coil T1/T2.
Silencing ADS again in T11 add phase iirc(been so long I forgot if Ball does high voltage)
Silencing Gobskin in A2s
Silencing Flan speed boost in A3s
Silencing Mind Blast (or w/e the aoe charm was called) in A6s(and phase 2 of A8s I guess?)

I'm sure there's more. Basically anything you might care about silencing.

But by comparison, the Eos buffs were so potent that SCH was still competitive/better at blocking incoming damage in spite of having weaker AOE shields after the enormous Noct AST buff (and honestly a less consistently strong single target shield too).


Selene was given a raw deal, I tells ya! Probably because she wears her hair up in buns. *sigh*

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Originally Posted by Brightamethyst

Leeches was replaced by Esuna for balance reasons. Since Scholar evolves from a DPS class instead of a healing one is it has no low level healing spells besides Physick and pet abilities. EVERYTHING else is learned at 30+. That led to problems when you were trying to do dungeon like Toto-rak and Brayflox but couldn't cure poisons until level 40. Leeches was removes and replaced with Esuna as a role action to fix that issue.

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They could just add it as a Scholar skill early on, they clearly don't mind removing skills between job change so why not add one, and it'd mean that a class Like Sage dosent have its entire naming convention broken by a random Esuna.

It just feels like a lot of healers have had these changes that contradict with their Lore, White Mage now has no elements in its entire moveset despite every bit of it being an opposite to black mage, using Stone, Wind and Water, now all there is-is Aquaveil, I don't know if I'm dumb for caring so much but the game clearly wants me to be invested in the lore, hence why the story campaign is required for progression but I feel like I'm being punished for trying to read more into it!
Let's not even talk about healer damage being so low that every story related battle is a slog meaning the only time I had fun was when I got to play as other characters, a stance or anything to buff damage while alone would also be appreciated, I've heard tanks struggle too but not to the same extent as trying solo content with an Astrologian...

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Originally Posted by IlluminaMentia

They could just add it as a Scholar skill early on

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That's probably not as easy as it sounds. If it was possible to retroactively add low level skills not attached to base classes they probably would have just made leeches level 16 or something and called it a day.

Even now we can still see this. It if was that easy to slot in low level job specific skills we'd probably have long since seen things move around. Succor at level 10 to match Medica/Helios/Prognosis, etc.

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Originally Posted by WhiteArchmage

It was indeed the case at the time. The Job Stones worked by giving you new spells after level 30, exactly one new skill every 5 levels, so SMN and SCH shared the exact same skillset until lvl 30 and even then, they shared ACN skills up until 50, this meant that SCH shared Ruin 1 and 2 and both levels of Bio and Miasma, which incidentally made SCH the more "DPS-oriented" healer, SMN still has Physick I don't know if you mean SCH gets a Scholar-only version or something because I haven't seen SCH's skillset in a while (it was certainly useless for SMN since HW, because it scales off MND and not INT), I'd guess they made SCH Ruin also scale off MND instead of INT for SMN with the removal of Cleric Stance.

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Yup, Scholar on the Job Guide has a "Scholar-only" version of both Ruin and Physick. Ruin has less potency (and as you said, likely scales off of Mind) while Physick has higher potency. Both are clearly marked with the SCH symbol while Resurrection is still marked with an ACN symbol, and in-game the skills only list SCH for which job the skills belong to.

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Originally Posted by Brightamethyst

That's probably not as easy as it sounds. If it was possible to retroactively add low level skills not attached to base classes they probably would have just made leeches level 16 or something and called it a day.

Even now we can still see this. It if was that easy to slot in low level job specific skills we'd probably have long since seen things move around. Succor at level 10 to match Medica/Helios/Prognosis, etc.

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But it's something we've seen them do plenty now? As I mentioned earlier in the thread, almost all of Scholar's low level skills are Scholar-only, not Arcanist - both the ones that share the same name and effect but with different potencies, and the spells like Bio and Bio II that no longer exist at all on Arcanist. It might not have been possible originally, but it definitely seems to be doable now.

If you think scholar is bad check out ast. The cards used to make sense bole used to be for tank now its ranged dps balance used to be for ranged dps now its melee or tanks.

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Originally Posted by IlluminaMentia

They could just add it as a Scholar skill early on, they clearly don't mind removing skills between job change so why not add one, and it'd mean that a class Like Sage dosent have its entire naming convention broken by a random Esuna.

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The name 'Leeches' isn't worth all of that effort to retain. Hell, it was never a great name for the ability either; I get that it's a name that evokes ancient medicine, and especially combat medicine which is ostensibly Scholar's vibe, but 'leech' implies some form of life drain rather than 'remove debuff', especially in gaming where 'leech healing' is... y'know, an actual thing, albeit a thing FFXIV doesn't do.

White Mage is a whole different thing, that largely stems from the fact it's the only instance where the starting job actually doesn't match the classic FF job it became: classical White Mage casts Holy and Dia, not Stone and Aero, so one of them has to give. That said, Aquaveil is a sign that they're not completely rejecting it; they do want that elemental edge to be part of White Mage, they just don't want it to come at the expense of 'classic White Mage'.

(Also, as someone who played AST during the EW MSQ: the problem isn't that it was a struggle, it was actually the opposite, it was very easy but very dull. Healers aren't much fun without people to heal.)

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Originally Posted by Grimr

If you think scholar is bad check out ast. The cards used to make sense bole used to be for tank now its ranged dps balance used to be for ranged dps now its melee or tanks.

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Uhm, no, you're quite wrong here. Balance used to be for everyone, it was a flat damage boost, and ironically given the name, quite possibly the single worst idea in the entire game as far as balance goes. The Balance was the only card always worth drawing, everything else ranged from, depending on when we're talking, 'situational' to 'useless' to 'actively detrimental to some teammates'. Also, I'm not sure why you think either of those cards 'made sense' where they were, nothing about either of those cards explicitly says 'tank' or 'ranged DPS'.

Now if we were talking about the fact Arrow is for melee DPS we could talk, but that's not really something that 'used to be better'. Even with Old AST Bard was a 'yeah, you'll do' choice for Arrow.

ff3 white mage had aero/ga and devout tornado, it's not a terribly recent addition.

If referring to specifically ff1, monk/pugilist don't have enormous hp pools/unquestionably highest damage and black mage doesn't have any utility e.g. haste.

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Originally Posted by fulminating

ff3 white mage had aero/ga and devout tornado, it's not a terribly recent addition.

If referring to specifically ff1, monk/pugilist don't have enormous hp pools/unquestionably highest damage and black mage doesn't have any utility e.g. haste.

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I was talking about 'their overall image and reputation, across all games'. Outside of XIV, white mage has only used Aero once, in FF3; after that point Aero becomes a blue mage staple, and hasn't been native to a white mage skillset since (outside of Bravely Default, but even that gave it to red mage in BD2). Stone is even less represented, that's never been in a white mage kit; water doesn't even have a consistent lineup of spells across the franchise, and when it turns up it's usually blue or black magic.