Scholars what are your thoughts?

[Verdan]

I maintain that compressing the dots on a dot class is bad. Honestly, compressing dots only worked on one class, White Mage, but even then not really. We still lost damage from Aero 2 to make it tic longer, which is pretty significant. Black Mages GOT a dot instead of losing one because thunder 2 was useless.
It's just no fun on a dot class to not be looking at and making decisions about your dots.

[Rubiss]

What are you talking about? I don't remember anyone saying scholar was too complicated. If anything people were annoyed that scholars always had a guaranteed raid slot above all.

I also don't get all the whm hate in this thread. They aren't much better off so how about we actually direct frustration where it should be directed.

So it's just a coincidence that Scholar has 1 castable DoT (Miasma vs Aero 3), 1 instant cast DoT (Bio 2 vs Aero 2), oGCD (Shadow Flare/Energy Drain/Bane vs Assize)? The rotation has been dumbed down to be incredibly similar to WHM. The changes to Scholar don't affect their raid slot at all. It just made them feel bad. Poor, boring DPS rotation, more starved for Aetherflow (SMN has gotten one new aetherflow skill since 2.0 whereas SCH has gotten two, one top of having one, namely sacred soil, be terrible), a crappy trait and a weakened fairy. It's beyond obvious SCH was homogenized to play like WHM.

[KDSilver]

Can you send me back to 3.0 so I can see my true scholar and have fun with it?
Thank you !

[Zalchion]

Can you send me back to 3.0 so I can see my true scholar and have fun with it?
Thank you !

I agree! Current SCH feels like a husk of their former self..

[Alice_89th]

4.0 Made me think it is time to split SMN and SCH.
It feels like my DoTs/AoE got obliterated because SMN got a fancy new pet.

Two DoTs > Bane > Broil Broil Broil has not been fun so far.
I'm incredibly attached to this job and would love to keep playing it, but it is hard not to be salty.

I have trouble believing it's that bad, so I'll give a level 60 roulette a try and see how it goes.

I did leveling roulette with the FC and everything was just fine. And FC runs means "pull everything in the whole dungeon" type of runs. Aurum Vale, Snowcloak, Wanderer's Palace (Hard), Pharos Sirius (Hard) all gave me no issues whatsoever. I've had no problems in SB either, except having to be a bit more careful with my Mana now.

[Serilda]

I've been dabbling in SCH (played it a lot in HW as a solo healer and felt it was satisfyingly overtuned) and while I thought the response was a bit melodramatic next to the gutting of WHM, I now agree to some extent. This needs some fixing. Obviously I don't have the level 70 kit yet.

- SCH needs some more satisfying AOE damage capabilities back. I barely ever used Blizz2 before but with the rest of the toolkit trimmed down so much there's a huge honking gap where some kind of sustained AOE capability should be. It's blindingly obvious when playing the job. It suddenly feels incomplete.
- I actually like the simplification of DOTs etc (sorry - my pad only has so many buttons), but there needs to be something to manage in its place or it's just boring in easy content (i.e. most of the game). The same problem WHM has with its new oversimplification. WHM is missing some kind of support mechanic to give them things to do (SCH has this in spades) while SCH is missing some kind of fun sustained damage contribution (WHM is fine here).
- I don't mind the new Aetherflow since the old one was ridiculously strong, but can't help feeling it would be simpler if we kept the old one and had costs rebalanced based off that instead, rather than bloating bars with two MP restore mechanics, one of which is clearly built around a different type of healer. I've never needed the aggro dump on SCH, personally.
- I agree with the Eye For An Eye change feeling unsatisfying. DT is a decent ability when you have E4E, and even more situational if you don't. This should have remained a core SCH skill.
- Honestly, I have nothing good to say about any of the healer role action changes. The only job I don't mind them on is AST; for both WHM and SCH they're very frustrating compared to the tank/DPS cross-role actions and the number of threads suggesting making 'remove Protect' macros shows that the system isn't as fun and lean as it should have been.
- While I'm here, can we please get the Embrace hotbar button to change based on the current fairy at long last, unless I missed it and it's now fixed?

[Sinaloa]

I played SCH from the beginning and I won´t touch it anymore.

The changes offend me directly as they clearly say. "You healer. You dumb. We make you easy easy healbot."

Sch was a class with a high skillceiling. Now you got to have to have the intelligence of a ARR fairy to maximize his potential.

[Cynfael]

I'm looking forward to hitting 70 and taking a break from SCH to play a different Job.

Not every change was a bad one, but these are some of the issues impacting my fun:

- Logging into 4.0 and being substantially weaker in pretty much every way was not a good experience.

- I'd rather we euthanize Lily and give her a proper burial so that we could all grieve and move on. This is the second expansion in which she's been massively nerfed. In 3.0 the SCH abilities offset this issue, so we didn't complain too loudly, but by now it's clear that SE doesn't know what to do with her.

- If I want to play WHM, I'll swap to AST. Or maybe to actual WHM, depending on my mood. Making Adlo even more expensive and nerfing Aetherflow to force us into using Lucid Dreaming was a dick move.

- Simply increasing our heal potency or fixing the faerie doesn't sound so outlandish when you consider how stupidly powerful AST is with its higher potencies, innate healing buffs from sects, and shared access to Largesse. Who needs a faerie when you have that much horsepower and superior shielding to boot?


To be clear, I'd rather AST not be nerfed to appease the other two healers. What I would like is generally to compete, whether we are talking raids or dungeon play.

[Junkboy]

No one at SE plays SCH. You can't possibly say with a straight face that SCH was tested by professionals. This is an amateur botch made by developers who have literally zero idea how to balance. I'm convinced YoshiP only knows how to balance BLM. Whoever proposed the idea of SCH's changes in 4.0 and whoever ultimately signed off on it needs to be fired. That level of incompetence is rivaled only by the one who implemented the shallow requirements for the instance server.

This can't be said enough. Some of the changes were made by people who literally don't play SCH and seem almost not play tested it's a shame too.

[dynus]

Don't have access to the Stormblood material yet, but here are my thoughts so far.

- The nerf to Aetherflow isn't that bad with Lucid Dreaming in your kit. Is it annoying, yeah, but hit LD, use Energy Drain, and then hit Aetherflow again and you're good to go.

- The nerf to Bane is more than annoying. It was needed to balance summoner, but it really hurts Scholar's DPS output.

- I barely noticed the cost increase to Aldo until it was pointed out. Annoying, but manageable.

- Lack of AoE hurts. Bane was super useful before, and Miasma II was nice if mobs got close, but with the nerfed Bane and no Miasma, Scholar is lacking in the DPS department.

- No Stoneskin sucks. Period.

- It is really nice not having to stance dance, but I know that made healing jobs for some people. It didn't for me.

- I see no point in having Eye for an Eye in your tool kit. A one in five chance for 10% less damage? I don't see the point. This may change as I play around.

- I'm pretty sure we have the most healing buffs. Largesse and Eos' Fey Illumination, unless I'm misremembering. So that's useful.

- It's nice to still have Ruin II to weave between Broils.

All in all, it's still playable, but it's not the Job I've come to love. It's fixable. A new DoT in a future release, something to fix the Bane nerf, like a trait for Scholar's only (if possible, and I'm pretty sure it is.) And lower the MP cost for Aldo, and I'll be happy.