Feedback on 4.0 Scholar

[MeliaAntiqua]

This is going to be a very long post, so I gave it its own thread. I want to share my opinion on all the changes that hit Scholar with Stormblood.

Something to keep in mind:
My thoughts are purely based on my experience as a long time Scholar main (two and a half years) who has raided on SCH since final coil. Keep in mind that we don't know yet how the new Omega raid will play out. It could be different in design to the point of making some of my observations obsolete. Stormblood hit early access five days ago, so I can only take dungeons and the primals as a basis for my experiences to and at level 70.


That said let's start off with Scholars new skills:

1. Excogitation: The idea behind this skill sounds great in a world where cleric stance exists. It would have allowed a timed Lustrate at any time without leaving cleric stance. But since CS is gone, this skill feels lackluster. Its potency is only marginally better than a Lustrate which can now be used anytime without worries. Excog is also gated behind the massive wall of aetherflow and a 60 second cd. That is even more than an amasing ability like Indom. To make this useful over Lustrate, it needs to fill its role better. Give it a small damage reduction (just 5%) that lasts until the big damage is coming in. This would synergize with its proactive nature. Alternativly you could increase its potency a bit and/or remove/reduce its cost in aetherflow or cooldown. As a quality of life change it would be great if the heal would automatically trigger at the end of its duration (nothing feels worse than a warrior using Equilibrium at 55% and Excog running out. Just wasted an aetherflow stack).
   
2. Broil II: Not really a lot to talk about here. I will discuss SCHs overall damage output further down. I like its animation though.
   
3. Chain Strategem: There is again nothing wrong with this skill. Only useful on bosses/high hp adds but thats what everybody cares about anyway. It is in the same category as Battle Litany or Brotherhood in terms of its overall raid damage increase. It just pales in comparison to the stronger raidwide damage utility of things like Trick Attack or the Balance. Especially the balance still feels overtuned in addition to Astros good healing output. In itself though Chain Strategem is a nice addition.
   
4. Quickened Aetherflow: Again a good idea, but poorly done. With SCH having more and more skills to use Aetherflow on, it was time to give them some sort of cd reduction. It is just incredibly counterintuitive to have an ability that procs it's own cooldown reduction. You only get three 20% chances of this happening a minute. Doing the math quickly, you get no cd reduction at all in 51.2% of complete aetherflow consumption. RNG that is so obviously against you is not worth in a game with heavily scripted fights. This is like the chance of your next Succor costing no mp after you use Sacred Soil. Completely unreliable. Increase it's probability if you want this self-procing stuff or change it to a more often used skill like embrace. Having a 50% chance for every embrace cast to reduce Aetherflows cooldown by one second would be my prefered choice. There is a maximum of 20 embrace casts a minute which would result in an average cd reduction of 10 seconds and would be far more reliable than a 50% chance of getting nothing and a 0.8% chance of cutting the cd in half like it is now. (All the numbers in my proposal could obviously be adjusted but I feel this is a good starting point)
   
5. Fey Union: Oh boy where to start on this one...
   Firstly some quality of life stuff: Its range of only 10y sucks. If your target moves two steps back to dodge an aoe, the link is gone. If you want that short range, make the faerie move with its target and not stand there doing nothing but continuing to deplete the gauge. Since it is a faerie ability its use is clunky and often activates after some very long seconds. It is therefore not usable for clutch healing and only good for phases of predictable sinlge target damage.
   Secondly, it's effect also sucks. A 480 potency heal every 3 seconds sounds incredible but it is not. "480 potency" in faerie speech means something like 330 actual potency and since it counts as an ability, it cannot be buffed. Illumination, Rouse, Mantra, Convalescence, the list goes on and on. They all have no effect on this! You also only get to use three ticks of this per minute.
   Overall Fey Union is so poorly designed and has so many flaws that hold it back from beeing a good ability. Its implications for Embrace and Dissipation will be discussed in their seperate part.
   
   How to fix Fey Union (just some ideas):
   It needs massive QoL improvements as stated above to be not such a headache to deal with. Potency increases could also be made to make it feel more impactful.
   Furthermore it would be great to have a single target and an aoe mode. In situations of predictable medium strength single target damge it does a good job. But I also experienced phases of mostly aoe damage where I was filling the gauge to its maximum and still prefered the normal embraces that can help topping people off very flexible instead of giving individual people a tether for one or two ticks which would be stronger but very micromanaging intensive. So a mode in which you have a small aoe heal would be welcome.
   Filling the gauge only with aetherflow abilities is also not great. Incorporating the faeries into it makes more sense since it is a faery gauge after all. Make every embrace cast increase the gauge by one or two points so you can use it more frequently and make it again more impactful.
   Last but not least it would be awesome to have Fey Union beeing a further distinction between Eos and Selene. Eos lowering the targets damage received or increasing its healing received and Selene increasing the targets damage dealt. Something other than just "a stronger embrace with no flexibility"
   
   Overall this ability needs to be looked at the most out of all the new skills. Why do we now get a massively disappointing skill at max level two expansions in a row? Dissipation was and still is mostly useless and Fey Union is the biggest mess imaginable.

Now that we have looked at all the new stuff, let us take a look at what has changed in regards to old abilities:

• Single target damage: The loss of two DoTs hits the SCH playstyle hard. Spamming Broil 80% of the time is just boring. Healers dont need complex dps rotations but the old SCH had more things to keep in mind and also better weaving potential. There are now so many clipped gcds, it makes me sad. Overall though, it is still in an ok spot compaired to...
• AoE damage: This is a big one. SCH aoe is dead. The Bane nerf, only two spreadable dots (70 vs 110 potency per tick), shadowflare uptime halfed, miasma II gone (I never thought I would miss you) and no access to Blizzard II. Whoever came up with the idea of destroying SCH aoe damage needs to be fired. What kind of "balance" is this? WHM gets an aoe dot with no potency falloff, assize every 60 seconds and a massive 200 potency spammable nuke in the form of holy that has better damage falloff than bane, stuns for 4 seconds and can be used without mp cost with their new Thin Air skill. This is so mind-boggling, I am extremely angry about this one. Paladins complained for years, that they need a spammable aoe skill and you finally listened. But now you give SCH the PLD treatment? WTF. Give SCH a spammable aoe skill!
• Shadowflare: I mentioned it above. In aoe situations its halfed uptime hurts our damage but I like the new Shadowflare better nonetheless. Not having a three second cast on a skill that rarely got its full damage out because of mobs dying or bosses moving is a good thing. Especially on single targets like bosses, the change is in fact a damage increase (two more Broil II per minute (460 potency) for the loss of half the uptime (250 potency)). I like it.
• Embrace: Another expansion, another nerf. Embrace is more and more becoming just a regular regen that costs no mp and has infinite uptime (around 185 actual potency based on my investigations; AST and WHM get 150 on their regens). This would not be so bad if Fey Union was actually a good skill. As it stands now, Fey Union only compensates for the potency loss of Embrace. Since Physick is already weaker than its AST and WHM counterpart, I dont understand the need to nerf Embrace even further.
• Adloquium: The next big skill. Adlo is more and more losing its usefulness to AST shields. Adloquium costs an insane amount of mp, has a casttime and is only a 300/300 healing/shielding skill compaired to the cheaper, instant, more powerful Aspected Benefic (230/575). The important part about Adlo was always its shield. The 300 healing potency often gets wasted or only partially used. If you want Adlo to remain that weak compaired to AB, at least change it to a 200/400 heal/shield. I personally would also like a mp cost reduction and a buff to 200/450 or 250/450 (which would still make it worse than an AST shield), but I take everything to make Adloquium great again.
• MP management: This was always the strong point of SCH and I therefore had nearly no extra piety when going into Stormblood. I quickly realized that the old days are gone when entering the first dungeon, doing a bigger pull and suddenly standing there with nearly no mp left. The reduced mp recovery from Aetherflow combined with a more expensive Adloquium and damage rotation and an increase in Adloqiums needed thanks to the embrace nerf was a shock at first. It has since gotten better because there is more piety on lvl 70 gear, but the fact remains, that SCH lost one of its strength. Might be more balanced with the other healers though.
• Overall healing output: Leaving cd based healing aside (SCH has Lustrate and Indom, WHM has Tetra/Bene and Assize, AST has Essential Dignity and Earthly Star; they are all different, but fulfil the same purpose), let's look at their always available healing. As stated above SCH has the best regen (if you count the fairie just for that), but not by much anymore. AST and WHM have better potency on their base heal (440/460 and 450 vs 400) and have an upgraded heal (Cure II and Benefic II) where SCH has no equivalent since Adloqium is double the mp cost of those and serves another purpose (which both AST and WHM have their equivalent in Aspected Benefic and Devine Benison). Aoe is a similar story where Succor is just bad compaired to Helios and Medica (and both having two forms). Therefore SCH needs the Embrace nerf reverted or a buff to Physick or a better upgraded heal by buffing Adloquium into that role. Some form of Potency increase.

As we can see there are a lot of things that SCH lost and we still need to talk about the things that remained the same which should have changed:

• Selene: Selenes toolkit saw no changes although many people have stated for a long time now, that it needs changes. There is still a completely unusable silence taking up a slot and a very niche aoe cleanse. With AST in the game for two years now, Fey Wind is still only 3% whereas AST can give 5% in form of arrow (I dont want to start about the balance). IMO Eos is still the far superior faerie for progression with all three of her skills being useful in many situations.
• Dissipation: Has always been an extremely lackluster skill for situations in which you need an aetherflow stack immediately which mainly happens when you screw up. It's 20% increased healing never made up for the lost faerie and never synergized with the three aetherflow stacks you get from it. Fey Union only makes this worse since you dont fill the Fay gauge when using aetherflow abilities as long as no faerie is summoned. This makes Dissipation even more of a contradictory mess. Making the 20% healing increase apply to your aetheflow abilities should have been implemented a long time ago. Additional thoughts in regards to its synergy with Fey Union are now needed as well.

Overall I am very unhappy with all the changes that hit SCH in Stormblood. I read countless posts over the years here on the forums and on reddit from people just being in love with how well designed SCH was in 2.x and 3.x. And the reactions were always incredibly positive. IMO and that of many others I met, SCH was the best designed job in the game. Its synergy with other jobs and the fights was amasing. There were tools to handle every situation that the game could throw at you and if you died you felt like it was your fault for not playing the job to its maximum efficiency. Even after 2.5 years of raiding on SCH, I was still learning, still improving because of the high skill ceiling.

You could now argue, that not much has changed, but the feeling is totally different. Cleric stance was more or less a trademark of SCH and its loss alone brings WHM and AST more in line with SCH. The new damage rotation feel boring and way to Broil II centric, the aoe damage is gone. The challenging stance dancing in combination with four dots and nice weaving is gone. That were the things that made SCH stand out as a very enjoyable class to me.

And the healing department is not looking better. Being limited more by mp, direct nerfs to Embrace and the new healing tools being lackluster does not improve SCH healing toolkit. On the other side, WHM and AST got their healing buffed either directly or due to their new skills and the content scaled with the improved healing output in mind. That leaves SCH in the dust. I experienced more situations in which I felt my class is just too weak in these five days of playing Stormblood than in all those years before. The healing output of all three healers was IMO never the reason why I would have considered SCH to be OP. SCH now offers no real advantage over WHM/AST other than bringing a flexible regen in form of the faerie. AST is providing a similar and in parts better level of mitigation and has insane dps buffs. WHM shits on SCH in raw healing output and its personal dps capabilities.


Final thoughts:
My worst nightmare has come true. SCH feels boring to play and weak in its healing. I really hope SE is reading all the SCH threads carefully and realizes that they need to fix this quickly. I can see many people myself included switching to other jobs if there is no improvement before Omega savage comes out.

Feel free to discuss this in a mannered fashion to bring the whole SCH topic to the front of SEs concerns.