White Mage vs Scholar - Why is White Mage lacking?

[Kelya]

You solve the problem by your own answer about MP Cynfael. Leveling until 60 will increase the MP cost of every spell as well as increasing your mana pool. This leads to things still proportional (more mana to use but more cost). About Shroud itself then, remember that since you'll have more piety, you will also have more natural MP regen. Even if things stay proportional, bigger natural MP regen means you will need more and more time to consume your mana pool as you add piety (situation from now where ppl go Piety build) / as you level up (situation coming soon with the extansion). The bigger natural MP regen will compensate for Shroud not to scale. This is already the case currently : having tons of Piety is a lot (not to say completly) changing the WHM gameplay. Having 5,2K + MP makes Shroud a joke since you have so much MP you even can forget about the spell itself if you want.

At least, that's how I analyze it, I can be wrong or forget another thing too.

[Cynfael]

Snip

You and Lyrica are not wrong about the increasing scale of MP regen, but by that logic we might as well remove the MP benefit of Shroud entirely.

I do believe I am correct in predicting that Shroud will lag hilariously behind in the future if not addressed at some point, assuming that everything else scales up (both MP expenditure and passive regen) while Shroud remains untouched. It's fine for now, but will need tweaking down the line if we want to maintain status quo.

Edit: Also remember that we've been running at lvl 50 MP costs with hugely inflated ilvls for some time. There's no guarantee that this dynamic will continue when clvl increases.