Scholar -- the game at 50 and beyond

[reality_check]

Our MP regen only APPEARS so much better than WHM because people are doing content that allows you to still use Energy Drain and Physick exclusively.

That doesn't really make any sense. If you're having mp issues then a whm in the same spot will be having worse mana issues if you're healing the same amount. Also, Lustrate is always more mp efficient than using energy drain. The 1k+ heal (on a tank) is worth a lot more than the MP you'd get back from Energy Drain that you'd just turn around to heal for less than the Lustrate would.

Also, you totally neglect the pet that never runs out of MP. It needs an AI fix but that's about it.

[Xilrasis]

That doesn't really make any sense. If you're having mp issues then a whm in the same spot will be having worse mana issues if you're healing the same amount. Also, Lustrate is always more mp efficient than using energy drain. The 1k+ heal (on a tank) is worth a lot more than the MP you'd get back from Energy Drain that you'd just turn around to heal for less than the Lustrate would.

Also, you totally neglect the pet that never runs out of MP. It needs an AI fix but that's about it.

The difference is that BOTH classes become reliant on bard song, at which point mana regen as a whole becomes more or less irrelevant (or so small not to matter over the long term).
Besides, most of the time any advantage I had is quickly diminished by the fact that I have to heal my pet or resummon it.

The thing people also forget about the pet is that it takes an insane amount of random damage and spends more of the encounter wasting whispering dawn and time healing itself. The point of the Energy Drain comment is people have this misrepresentation of our mana regen as Aetherflow + 3 Energy Drains, when this is not the case. Also, my Energy Drain restores more mana worth of healing than a single lustrate provides on anything short of a Vit stacking warrior.

The point of my post is that Scholar's advantages with the current pet AI situation are null, and we have an extremely small toolkit for healing mass AoE damage, which will put us at an extreme disadvantage later on as we all know that MMOs enjoy spaming AoEs. This could be something as basic as a 200 potency AoE heal that simply costs less mana than Succor so that i'm not forced to spam a huge mana heal for 150 potency worth of healing since the shield is already applied.

I think Scholar is very close to where it needs to be, and I believe you missed this. I just feel like we need a quality of life fix or two before things progress into more serious content, such as an alternative to succor for bulk AoE healing (a fix to whispering dawn/pet AI would go miles toward helping this) and pet AI and performance in general (make commands usable while casting, immune to status effects, and a little bit more survivability).

With these things done, I would be extremely happy with the present state.