SE, what is the vision and identity of Scholars?

[Deox]

SCH's are and have been a jack of all trades healer that relied on you to completely memorize fights to make the most of your abilities and damage. Sch's have an answer to everything as long as they don't blow through their "answers" at the wrong times

[MAD_ARCHITECT]

SCH's are and have been a jack of all trades healer that relied on you to completely memorize fights to make the most of your abilities and damage. Sch's have an answer to everything as long as they don't blow through their "answers" at the wrong times

This. We're the strategist job, and I've always found it fun for encouraging precisely that style of play. SCH is a swiss army knife on a razor's edge, and I love it for it.

That said, it is unfortunate that the other healer jobs have it so easy in comparison that SCH's precise tactician-style play can become a burden to a learning group of players that may be very prone to make mistakes. While SCH will always perform well with a group of competent teammates, AST and WHM overshadow it in many spheres (progression, DF) with their ability to generously make up for the failures of other players, or even the healer themselves.

So, I don't think the identity of the Scholar is the problem, though of course I wouldn't say no to some shield buffs. I think the problem is that the other two healers are too easy to do well with, and right now, SCH doesn't bring enough to the table to make it worth taking over them. Giving them even more tools for their kit would be a great way to up their value without turning them into healbots--that's the tradeoff they're supposed to be making, after all. This could include more interesting mitigation effects, other ways to affect DPS (Chain Strategem is a great idea going in a cool direction,) or a retooling of Selene to make her more of a functional swiss army knife herself, which I believe is what SE was trying to aim for when they designed her.

[Enla]

or a retooling of Selene to make her more of a functional swiss army knife herself, which I believe is what SE was trying to aim for when they designed her.

Or hell, just replace Silent Dusk with a HoT or another AOE heal. I don't think I know a single person who ever uses Silent Dusk even in solo content and that useless skill honestly limits Selene's use even though she was the better faerie to take for the longest time Now with the potency nerfs she's a hard sell unless you've memorized the fight to it's entirety and are with a group of likewise competent individuals. Which is unfortunate because the rest of Selene's kit is absolutely amazing.

[MintnHoney]

I figured, with this expansion, the SCH would have seen an increase in the number of Aetherflow stacks they'd be able to generate (I figured it would increase to 5), mostly because I figured they'd be adding more options that would require Aetherflow.
In my mind, I think increasing the number of Aetherflow stacks which can be generated and held would help ease at least some of the issues.. but there's still a few AI tweaks and a couple of potency increases that would be beneficial to the identity of the class(particularly to the shields; personally, I'd think, with Adlo, allowing for 200% HP healed as base and then doubling up on that if it crits (so, 400%), and allowing Succor to double the shield it gives upon crit, and allow it shield for the highest amount healed of all characters across the party (so if at least one member is crit healed, they all get that shield) OR calculate a single chance to crit and apply that to all targets (so a successful crit heal applies to all members, though this could be a little too strong) as opposed to calculating individual chances to crit per character healed).

For as much as the current changes increase the number of things that need to be managed and how closely they need to be managed, I don't see enough of a reward to justify the dial up in difficulty.

[Vilenya]

This. We're the strategist job, and I've always found it fun for encouraging precisely that style of play. SCH is a swiss army knife on a razor's edge, and I love it for it.

You may be right but the current play style doesn't support a strategist type job. In fact it favors a use your atherflows before you atherflow cool down timer is up job. You can see this in the design of the fairy gage, quickened atherflow trait, and mp increase on spells. The job now revolves around atherflow use to make it work not saving certain abilities like indom for the perfect time. Gating the abilities behind both atherflow and a cool down timer (looking at you indom and excog) also doesn't support this play style. It basically says you can use this ability if you have atherflow and if it’s not on a timer, but not necessarily when it’s absolutely need. Sure you can save it but you are going to cripple yourself by not using the mana returns of atherflow. Without these mana returns aldo and succor become nearly unworkable and will kill your mana in a heartbeat.

On top of this if they want us to be jack of all trades they need to realize that the dps aspect of the job has to be a core component of the class. If we are not going to get buffs like ast has, then something needs to fill in the space when the healing atherflow abilities simply are not needed. You can say we have bane, which is garbage now, and Energy Drain, which is wasted if you don't need mana at the time, but we don't really have any core decent dps spells that use atherflows.

This is the problem I see with SE is that it has no direction in which they are going with sch. They didn't like what it had become in AAR and HW (which I personally thought was fine) but were unwilling to do the necessary work to shift its identity to something else. SE tried to do it by keeping the lower level abilities intact and shift it with the upper level abilities to change the play style. This just proved be an unwise choice because now the class tries to do everything and it either becomes too powerfully like in HW or falls flat on its face like now. So yes, I think scholar is definitely in the midst of an identity crises and I don't think it’s going to be fully fixed and feel complete until SE decides what it’s doing with it and puts in the changes at every level.

[Feidam]

The use of of all your aether flow stacks in the cooldown window of aetherflow does not change the tactician play style.

[Ceasaria]

But all of these extra heals are almost never actually needed, so it's kinda pointless to brag as the "strongest" healer when no one gives a fuck.

I always welcome extra free heals which can allow me to dps more.

[Pence]

I always imagine games as having 3 types of healing: Direct, HOT and Shields. SE should just make AST the HOT master instead of making is the master of heals.

[silverlunarfox]

I'd appreciate them if theyd stop nerfing fairy heals and not buffing anything in the original sch set... i.e. physick, adlo..............it really just cramps the class. I get eos is a bit op in lower levels, but no amount of nerfs will change that....since it STILL is op in low levels but now close to useless in high levels....

I get they wanted to nerf it down...but...I'm a bit tired of seeing AST continuously buffed. Yes they needed the first rounds of buffs but after that (ast was awful at start of 3.0).....it just kept getting more and more...and more..

[inhaledcorn]

I mentioned this in the SCH mega thread, but I think SCH's identity now is the "flexible" healer. SCH has on-demand shields and passive healing (the fairy) which the other two don't. To really make it feel like the flexible healer that SCH wants to be, I think Emergency Tactics needs to become a toggle buff rather than a one-time cooldown. This solves quite a few of SCH's healing problems. The other thing I would do is add the 50 lost potency on Embrace back to Physick. I would make some adjustments to the fairies to better define themselves as the "healing" and "support" pets they claim to be. I would like to see Dissipation instead be a fairy swap to have better control of your pet and what buffs you send out/need without using too many resources. Fey's Union is still hard to fix because it really doesn't give SCH anything unique.