Quote Originally Posted by Alisi View Post
Rawr!
(Disclaimer: I quit WoW shortly after Blackrock Foundry was released. Numbers might've scaled faster or slower than I've anticipated.)

Unless Scholars get a lot of 'pure', stackable and easily used absorbs like the Discipline Priest does, I wouldn't worry too much. Scholar absorbs are 'weaker' per default because their absorbing spells are split 50/50 between healing and actual absorbing, while Discipline Priests have a handful of spells that are 100% absorbs. A Scholar equally geared to their raid might give the group something like a 15% max HP buffer with a Succor, or double (and double yet again if critting) with Adloquium. Meanwhile, a Discipline Priest will be giving you a 30% max HP buffer with a simple Power Word: Shield, possibly as high as 80% with Archangel active and some crits/multistrikes (despite my modest gear, I'd get 220'000+ Power Word: Shield crits on people who were slightly above 300'000 max HP on a good day). Combine that with things like Divine Aegis and Spirit Shell which stack with all other absorbs, along with their absorption numbers actually being able to increase with repeated castings, and you can have Discipline Priests easily doubling a person's max HP with absorb buffers.

The difference in the damage model/flow also causes Discipline Priests to look even better. Most raid encounters in WoW cause medium bursts of damage regularly, allowing your absorbs to get used up, despite the shorter duration. Healing failures were usually caused by healers not pushing enough HPS to counter the regular damage, encouraging you to adjust between efficiency and throughput on the fly. Most encounters in XIV hit you with massive bursts of damage rarely, often leaving you barely alive, if not outright dead. Tank busters and the many Astral Flows/Super moves come to mind. Here you're encouraged to set up mitigation and pre-cast healing spells.

While absorbs are still valuable in the healing environment of XIV, they still end up looking weak compared to what a Discipline Priest can do. The lack of easily used 'pure' absorbs, along with only one type of absorption (Galvanized, compared to simultaneous Power Word: Shield, Divine Aegis and Spirit Shell) means that Scholars won't ever reach the point where they can do absurd shenanigans, such as fully nullifying moves like Gigaflare. Assuming they were carbon copies of Discipline Priest, they would probably be bringing Gigaflares down to 3 digit damage with a bit of button mashing. And assuming Squeenix does allow things like stackable absorbs, I'm hoping they monitor the situation closely, because besides creating a God Tier Meta™, it would also heavily reduce the difficulty of XIV's healing model, considering how reliant it is on massive bursts of damage.

Oh... I just realized I got way too serious with this post. Here, enjoy a lovely healing guide.