SE, what is the vision and identity of Scholars?

[Vilenya]

SCH has always been about the wise timing and appropriate management of Aetherflow skills woven through with the rest. Blowing through three Lustrates right after putting AF on cooldown is a quick ticket to a wipe when an emergency arises. You need to use your other tools in between your uses of Aetherflow in order to ration them out over the cooldown time--but those other tools aren't, and shouldn't, be so good that Aetherflow abilities just become a very nice, very possibly OP, bonus. Not running out of mana vs not running out of instant Aetherflow heals at a critical time is the very razor's edge on which the job is balanced.

Do we need buffs to this approach to healing to help us out? Certainly, particularly on the mitigation side of things--and DPS, which is just one more way to control the battlefield, would be a very welcome addition, too, especially since the class is designed to give us a lot of time to deal damage.

All of that just to say: I still don't think the job is having an identity crisis. That's not the root of the problem. We're still tacticians. We're just a little crippled in comparison to our competitors, who don't have to do much tactician-ing at all to get the same results. It feels like our high skill ceiling is still there, but the reward for reaching it is gone in the name of balance, and the easier healing jobs are able to perform as well as we do for less effort, while also having skills that are more functional, nicer to look at, and easier to use. That is the real problem here.

I agree with you and I am not debating that is probably what they are supposed to be. I just question whether SE is going in that direction or not. I think we can both agree that being a tactician means using the right ability at the right and in the right situation. With that in mind let me explain to you why I think SE is either going in the wrong direction or is all over the place. It really has to deal with the 3 abilities I talked about before, the fairy gage, quickened atherflow, and the new mp management scheme.

For a second lets first throw out the low chance of this happening, but to have the greatest opportunity to take fully advantage of the quickened atherflow trait you have to use your atherflows at least once every 10s. If you proc all 3 you reduce the cast time by 30s, anymore then this will run the risk of some of the cool down not counting. Is it likely to happen, probably not, and in this case you just blew through all of your atherflows in 30s - 50s. They then linked fey gage and fey union to the use of atherflows. This further incentives the use of atherflow to quickly build fey gauge for fey union. Finally they built the mana regeneration and mana costs of the class around the use of atherflow every time it comes off cool down, giving more incentive to use atherflow so you are not waisting them. What this means is that SE is pushing the player to use their atherflow within the 30 - 60s cool down of the ability but not necessary to use the abilities locked behind atherflow in a tactical manner. Can you still do it, absolutely, but you are being punished for saving the atherflow to use that wanted ability at the right time. With the current set of abilities there are times when there just isn’t a need to use all 3 atherflows within the cool down time. It was more advantageous to save them for when you did need them. I did this all the time before all of these different class aspects were attached to the use of atherflow. In fact I felt most comfortable when I had a full set of atherflow and the cool down was up. It gave me the most tactical advantage during fights. Scholar today puts you at a disadvantage for trying to play this way.

To be honest, there are many things they could have done with these 60 - 70 abilities that would further reinforce the tactician style of play. One idea would have been to make the atherflow trait have a 20% chance to return 1 atherflow and 3% mana to the caster. This would reward you for using your atherflow when you needed to (tactician style playing) instead forcing you to use them in a set time frame. Another thing would have been to completely de-link atherflow with sch mana regen and just centered it on something else. This also would helped to reinforce tactician style play. Finally they could have just completely used a different system to build fairy gauge, further reinforcing the use of atherflow skills when the time was right. They could have done any of these things without fundamentally changing the play style of the class, but they didn't. Instead they put in abilities that are counterintuitive to the tactician style play they had been building in HW and partially in SB.

[MAD_ARCHITECT]

-snip-

I see what you're saying, and I agree. Absolutely, it is abundantly clear that the Stormblood SCH's new tools are very strange in that they contradict the established playstyle of the job in design, and they don't even give you anything very good in exchange; as you say, there is nothing tactical about them at all. That is precisely why I never factor Fey Union into how I'm going to handle healing a fight, and never adjust my Aetherflow use based on the abhorrent RNG of Quickened Aetherflow. They are nothing but 'nice-to-haves' that only seldom serve my purposes when I need them the most. Even the much-criticized Dissipation has some tactical merit, in that it is one way to attempt to turn around a seriously critical situation, a real "oh sh--" button that isn't meant to be part of the SCH's normal rotation.

The point is, the job still works like it did in ARR and HW; that is to say, you don't have to consider FU (that abbreviation surely cannot be a coincidence) and QF in order to do your job well, and for that I am grateful. But that is a problem, too. No job in the game should be straight up ignoring the use of two of its new skills because they have no synergy with the rest of the kit, I am sure you will agree! Our skills should compliment our already established playstyle, not awkwardly insinuate changing it and then punishing you for trying to work with them due to RNG and the poor execution of Fey Union. But as we know from 3.0 AST, SE is not immune to making mistakes; and as we know of AST now, not to mention PLD, they are also capable of fixing them. I don't think they are trying to change the SCH playstyle, they just didn't realize how ineffective, unfun, and generally unappealing these additions were.

All of that said, until these two abysmal additions are modified to be reliable--and I like all of your suggestions, here--I simply won't be relying on them. I cannot be the only one, and I expect that SE will take a look at the Omega data and see that nobody has changed their playstyle to the inferior one recommended by FU and QF. Both of these skills sound great on paper, but are bland, unenjoyable and unexciting in execution, and I expect that SE will realize it soon.