Anyone else feeling a hit to SCH?

[Anselmet]

Hopefully if enough scholars saber rattle, we too, will get a nice giant thread to place our complaints. Then maybe in the next update they might restore some things.

[Amenako]

SCH has always been the OP class that never left his spot.
WHM is the healer with only 20 abilities now and a worthless passive.

I will agree SCH was OP in 2.0 but in 3.0 they were more balance then anything. But for SCH's to warrant this shit that just happened is fucking bs.
Every healing class has shitty passives but SCH has the worst fucking one out of the three, like wtf? im not going to spamming my energy drain just to get aetherflow up again, thats dumb logic.
How they going to give us new skills that use aetherflow stacks and not increase how much aetherflows we get?

[Mirakumi]

I'm going to be switching back to SCH main for stormblood, so I can't wait to see how it plays out despite many people telling me its going to be bad. lol o/ I just miss my sch too much.

[jameseoakes]

I'm going to be switching back to SCH main for stormblood, so I can't wait to see how it plays out despite many people telling me its going to be bad. lol o/ I just miss my sch too much.

I hope it works better than it looks have fun ^^

[LegoTechnic]

This is a bit of a long-winded rant, and it will probably be ignored and buried here, but I feel I need to say this otherwise I will not be able to enjoy Stormsblood. Even if no one pays it any mind, if I don't put pen to paper, at least nominally, then it will likely temper all activities today in dissatisfaction, so I will leave my concerns and then proceed to giving the new state of things an extended try, and then decide whether or not to switch mains after evaluating my feelings at 70.

When I first started ARR I began as an Arcanist shortly after the class was introduced. I wasn't initially intending to play as a healer because I had played one for much of WoW, but I went with the class because I enjoyed the WoW Warlock, and ACN was a strong analog for it. But at reaching level 30, I more or less switched. Part of this was healer queue times not being ridiculous, but as the class was developed I realized just how interesting it was. I've played a lot of MMOs, but I've never played a healing class like SCH before. It was fun, with a fairy that had powerful abilities on selective and restrictive cooldowns, a focus on proactive shielding mechanics, and an inability to throw out large heals to compensate. It was mobile with short cast times, retained the ACN dot playstyle for strong off-healer DPS, and had a fantastic mana management system, all of which combined made it a very different class to its counterpart the WHM. Whereas with WHM your focus was on constant upkeep of health and maintaining regens, SCH playstyle was much more inclined towards proactive defense and reactionary burst healing, and the two complemented each other very well.

Come Heavensward they took steps to cover healer class disparity, and SCH gained its tactics. These allowed a SCH to heal for large amounts once with a 30 second cooldown and further played off their shielding mechanic, and also gave it dissipation, a move intended to mode-change a SCH into a "pure healer" for 30 seconds for an additional Divine Seal benefit and stack refresh. While Dissipation is contentious, the tactics are fun, and they fit the SCH theme of powerful abilities on lengthy cooldowns similar to what the fairies utilize, though this time given to the SCH's themselves. Coupled with the AoE lustrate in indomitibility, HW SCH was mobile, had powerful burst healing, and retained a solid role-lock on off-healer because of its solid sustained DoT DPS, its ability to manage mana and not run dry while DPSing like both WHM and specifically AST, and its party synergy with fairy abilities. Its mitigation abilities were also almost required, especially early on in Gordias where a SCH's shields made or broke success in A3S. As a class they had terrible burst DPS, severely outperformed on short-lived adds compared to the other healers, but this was an acceptable price to pay for their general ability to keep being active in DPS casting for longer periods of time.

HW is also when AST was developed, but the problem with AST is and always has been that it's functionally a clone of WHM. While it borrowed a few of SCH's abilities such as Disable, gained succor and adlo variants in Noct stance, and uniquely combined Asylum and Sacred Soil with Collective Unconscious, its core was all very much identical to WHM playstyle. Luminous Aether was shroud of Saints, Benefic II is Cure II, Divine Seal was Synastry, Essential Dignity was Tetragrammaton (itself a WHM lustrate variant on a long cooldown), Gravity for Holy, and so on. Unique to the class was both the card dynamic and the ability to extend buff durations with time dilation and Celestial Opposition, and with Earthly Star this idea of time delay seems to be something they wish to build on. However at the start AST not only had a playstyle almost identical to a WHM, but it suffered severe mana limitations when attempting the off-healer role. Its DPS was a minor fusion with a clone of WHM's spammable Stone II coupled with SCH clone variants of Bio and Bio II, however Luminous Aether on its own wasn't enough to sustain continuous DPS over long periods, and their Noct shields were simply not as viable as SCH's mitigation in the raid enviroments of Gordias and Midas that demanded it. This was addressed over time, and by Creator these issues were mostly resolved, but SCH still held high esteem because it was such a solid and reliable off-heal class with its heavy burst healing on demand and sustained DoT damage.

Somewhere along the way though, it seems they've decided that they want healers to be interchangeable; that they want you to be able to take any combination of the three to fulfill all demands. This isn't necessarily a problem, and it's a good design focus for class balance, but their method of doing this in Stormsblood is to bring all playstyles closer to WHM. And this is fundamentally what I take serious issue with. Aetherize is reduced in effect and Shroud of Saints refresh given to compensate to make mana regen between SCH and WHM identical after Assize's cooldown was reduced. Divine Seal was given to SCH because obviously people didn't appreciate fey illumination (which was nerfed in compensation) or dissipation enough. DPS was streamlined, giving the class a very simple two DoTs (down from four) with a strong single-target direct damage spell to spam, making it more or less identical to AST's DPS playstyle in HW with Shadowflare acting as the separated damage portion of Assize. And while there is contention on healers being able to heal in general, healer DPS has always been uninvolved, simplistic, and trash-tier levels of boring spam, so the loss of any complexity in this regard is kind of sad; it works because healers have other things to do, but as gear levels surpass the content and raiders find additional downtime with which to DPS it becomes more and more apparent and hurtful (thus while I supported cleric stance dancing).

In the end though, the point I wish to make is that SCH was a very unique healer class. I don't personally like playing as a WHM with its focus on regen upkeep and reactionary healing; I've tried it, and I've played AST who I dislike mainly due to the RNG mechanics of the card system (Boles and Spears for days). Much of this is personal, because I've played healers in other MMOs, and I've done these analogs before. But SCH? SCH was a uniquely designed class. It's a healer with a pet, one that hasn't actually had anything done with it since the end of ARR when Selene's speed buff was reworked into irrelevance, mind you, barring its recent nerf to embrace. It has an on-demand mana regen to with Aetherize that lets you both plan your ability use with its stacks and cooldown restriction, and while a refresh mechanic will be an easy adjustment to work into a repertoire, the homogenization of giving WHM abilities to SCH is a loss of something that made the class unique. Divine Seal is something similarly that wasn't asked for, especially given SCH already had two variants with which to use, both of which held unique restrictions based on the cooldown and fairy use. Furthermore as a class that began its first 30 levels as DPS, there was a strong DoT playstyle that permeated the damage ideals all throughout ARR and HW, with a focus of a class that could pop on considerable DoT's in under 15 seconds and then change focus to healing until refresh. They also had Virus, a mitigation tool that AST mirrored with Disable, which were abilities that have now been given to DPS, the classes typically least interested in raid mitigation for reasons I can't begin to fathom.

I feel that you had an excellent design in the SCH class, that it was unique and interesting, not to mention fun for those looking for something different from standard MMO healing, with a solid burst heal system and DoT-dps base that made it different from the vast majority of healing classes out there, but I honestly wonder at this point if you still have any pride in that? Why is it slowly losing what sets it apart and getting more and more homogenized in playstyle? Why has nothing been done with the fairy since ARR? And similar to how AST is largely full of clone abilities rather than unique healing flavor, why are you so afraid of the classes being different now as opposed to the solid complimentary structure from ARR?

See you all in Stormsblood I guess, one way or another.

[Rivxkobe]

Every healing class has shitty passives but SCH has the worst fucking one out of the three, like wtf

Worse than Secret of the Lily 2? I dunno about that.

[Cynfael]

We'll see how things pan out by 70, but all I can say right now is that it is never a good feeling to log in after a patch and be instantly and obviously less powerful than before. The faerie nerf (this time the nerf was blatant rather than "Oh...that's because of how she scales with level...as if we couldn't adjust that if we wanted to"), the Adlo MP increase....

Again, I'm willing to see what's in store for lvl 70 balance, but first impression is a predictably disappointing in almost every way.

[RyuDragnier]

Oh dear god, Adlo cost is 10% of your MP. Meaning you can't use it like you once could, and you have to aetherflow just to cover the cost. Please in the name of all that is holy let us not be reliant on Adlo at endgame...

[Verdan]

a good post

I read it and it was good

[Azell]

What i posted on the other topic:

Wanna fix sch? simple:
Bane: make it equal to all other aoes finishing at 50% on 5+, -80% is too much specially with only 2 dots.
Aetherflow: Put it back the 20% mp regen.
Adlo: return to the orginal mp cost formula. (Which already cost more than the AST better instant version)
Miasma: set it to 30s just like bio2 (same as smn)
Broil2: should cost just a tiny bit more than malefic 2 and less than stone 4.
Shadow flare: should have a 30s CD or even 40s, 60 is too high.
Fey Union: make it 20yamls. If you are going to lock our fairy to do a stronger regen it makes no sense to be such short range, This range thing is actually why cover isnt more used, it will suck to have the skill become useless if the target have to dodge an aoe and run out of range.

These changes are the big ones imo, and they need to be implemented if you wanna keep sch a float. The nerf hammer was completely unecessary at those points.
I agree with the embrace and illumination nerfs if those points are fixed.