Sadly sayiing goodbye to SCH

[jstamos]

Is 1.5k a lot? I'm asking seriously here, I'm not familiar with the actual dps output of healers currently.

No, I was just giving the last number I had in a fight where I had no issues healing (emphasis was supposed to be on how I was not having issues healing as scholar, to the point where I could also dps).

[Ftail]

I'd argue spreading Eye for an Eye is somewhat pointless as most damage will usually be focused on the tank(s) anyway so the rest of the group doesn't benefit from it as much, if at all.

Spreading an Eye for an Eye is not pointless, unless you are spreading it at bad times. Most bosses have raid wide AOE damage moves, an example of a great time to use it would be in V2 Savage during the move Antilight. It gives you plenty of time to aldo + eye for an eye the entire party which is always stacked together.

[YanderePrincess]

You're not factoring in the fairy's healing capability at all, which is a free ~55 pot/s that you don't even have to think about while dodging stuff, or more with the 40% pot boost from rouse.

WHM can CureII + tetra once a minute, SCH can Adlo + lustrate three times every 45s. Or adlo+lustrate+lustrate. The potency for both methods over 45s is the same if SCH alternates between adlo+physick, and more than WHM if SCH spams adlo (but not sustainable due to mana).

In Stormblood, the fairy ends up spending more time trying to keep herself alive than actually healing your allies, which is made even worse by the loss of Sustain since we can't use that to help the fairy get back to high enough HP faster so she'll start using those Embraces on allies instead of herself.

Also, for every time a sch casts Adlo to heal 300 potency (600 if you include the shield/use emergency tactics), a white mage can Cure II for 700 potency and at a vastly lower MP cost. On top of that, we've actually got a 48 second cd on tetragrammaton with 3 lilies, which isn't hard to get, while also keeping a 150 potency per tick regen going on the target, which over 45 seconds is going to heal 2250 potency, so if we're talking about healing over the course of 45 seconds, Regen alone heals more than 3 lustrates, not to mention white mage can also put a 15% of target's max HP shield on the target every 24-29 seconds, depending on lilies. Assuming the fairy actually does keep it's healing going on the target and doesn't end up wasting most her time healing herself, that's approximately 83 potency per second, though less effective than that due to the fairy having lower stats comparatively, so I'll guess that's where you got the 55 approximation. That's SCH's best chance to keep up with white mage, but has become highly unreliable unless you use macros to force your pet to Embrace the target instead of herself, in which case you're going to be ending up with a dead fairy much more frequently and having to spend that 2k+ mp plus swiftcast cooldown to resummon her. It'll vary some on the fight, of course.

You're also going to have more mana problems on SCH if you're using Adlo as much as you're talking about, since the efficiency on it has become horrifically bad.

[Starflake]

snip

I don't know what you are doing with the pet, but I never had this issue at all. Place your pet properly then, you know, interacting with your pet as a Scholar class? Why do you need Sustain on a pet? It does absolutely nothing for a Scholar since throwing a Physick on there heals for the same amount and is an instant heal rather than slow ticks. Also, if you micromanage your pet, she isn't healing herself at all as you can spam Embrace command and it will override it. Sustain healed rougly 25% of the pets HP, which is basically a small physick.
Aldloquim doesn't need to be seen or compared to a Cure II as it serves a difference purpose. It serves to shield more than it serves to actually heal. As a Scholar you don't go around spamming Adlo, especially in Savage content to heal people. And you seem to forget how useful critting Adlos is, it negates whole mechanics at times and you can spread the skill. 300 potency is more than fine for what it's able to do.

Your Regen comment is also terrible as Embrace hits harder than a WHM Regen and can simply be spammed if you micromanage your pet and it's free and it doesn't waste a GCD. I see no reason why you are comparing it to a Lustrate, it makes no sense at all.
Why does a Scholar have to keep up with a White Mage's raw healing, exactly? Does White Mage bring Chain Strategem? Does WHM have a free medica II every thirty seconds? Can WHM increase healing by 10%? Can WHM increase magical resistance for the whole party by 20%. Can White Mage put a 20k shield on someone / the party? Can White Mage throw out an instant 10k heal on the party every thirty seconds?

I don't understand you people at all. Scholar is in a fantastic position. Just a small potency increase on Physick or perhaps Embrace.

[Silver-Strider]

Spreading an Eye for an Eye is not pointless, unless you are spreading it at bad times. Most bosses have raid wide AOE damage moves, an example of a great time to use it would be in V2 Savage during the move Antilight. It gives you plenty of time to aldo + eye for an eye the entire party which is always stacked together.

I did say somewhat pointless, not completely pointless and even in that scenario, it's still only a chance to reduce damage so it's not a guaranteed thing, which is something I've never liked about EfaE but since it was a natural part of SCH prior to SB it wasn't a big deal but now that it's a cross role, competing with several other abilities that, depending on the encounter, are more useful than EfaE, I barely ever use it now, if at all.

[Dregenfox]

In Stormblood, the fairy ends up spending more time trying to keep herself alive than actually healing your allies, which is made even worse by the loss of Sustain since we can't use that to help the fairy get back to high enough HP faster so she'll start using those Embraces on allies instead of herself.

Why do you keep comparing GCD skills with oGCD skills? SCH gets whispering dawn + embrace hot without even having to waste either gcd or oGCD while WHM has to waste a GCD to get the equivalent. And you somehow discount shields on SCH but the 15% shield counts as healing for WHM?

Like I said in the post the SCH can match WHM with alternating adlo+physick which is very sustainable due to physick's low mana cost. You're also forgetting that when adlo crits it gets double bonus from shields.

I don't know what you're doing with the pet but it receives 25% damage from AOE's, and also gets AOE healing. Unless you're just placing the pet at a position and forgetting about it any AOE heal should handle the damage the pet is getting from splash aoe's.

[YanderePrincess]

snip

Maybe you should actually read the conversation I was having. We were specifically comparing whm and sch single target healing capability. Regen was compared as part of how much cure potency each of the two jobs have over the course of ~45 seconds.

Also, SCH doesn't get a free medica II every thirty seconds. They get a free aoe regen. It doesn't come with the upfront 200 potency heal that Medica II. Not saying it isn't a good ability, either, but it's not Medica II.

And no, Adlo shouldn't need to be compared to Cure II. The problem is that Adlo *is* the Cure II for SCH. This was fine back in 2.x (can't really comment on 3.x since I played WHM in 3.x instead, but it felt fine recently when leveling sch 51-60), but now it's just got far too high of an mp cost for far too low of an effect, especially since they also nerfed SCH's mp sustain. Overall, that's not necessarily a bad thing, as it still works well for an ability to cast before the pull and occasionally for topping off a tank's HP while also giving them a little extra, though it's best use now is for throwing on someone (especially a dps or healer) right before a big hit is thrown at them (easy example being the charge the first boss in Bardam's Meddle does) to mitigate it.

Crit adlo is awesome. Always has been. It's also almost impossible to get it to a higher rate than 1 in 5, maybe 1 in 4, and that's when you can actually optimize your gear for crit rate. This was less of an issue when you could pretty much spam Adlo, but now you have to use adlo very sparingly, so you rarely get to see a crit out of it. It's absolutely spectacular when it happens, but it's far, *far* too unreliable to actually count on, tying the bulk of Adlo's usefulness into RNG, such a strong usefulness when it *does* happen that they find the need to keep the non-crit effect very low. "Can whm 20k shield on someone?" No, but neither can SCH with any reliability.

All of this would be much less of an issue if it didn't effectively limit us to spamming a weaker Cure I to keep people alive. You say Adlo serves a different purpose than Cure II and you're right, but we really don't have anything to compensate for lacking a Cure II. Adlo used to, but it doesn't even come close to doing so anymore. Lustrate/Excogitate are the closest, and they definitely help and are in general good abilities, but they're gated behind aetherflow stacks and Lustrate itself is weaker than Cure II. Sure, you can spam three in 3 seconds for a very nice burst heal, but then you're down all of your aetherflow abilities until the aetherflow CD is up, or you consume your fairy and lose its healing for 30 seconds, and it still doesn't compensate for the fact that whm can easily just spam Cure II without running out of mp while negating 700 potency worth of damage taken every gcd, while sch is stuck spamming a 400 potency Physick with the occasional lustrate for 600 potency and an excog once every 45 seconds for 800 potency. That average potency comes out to a good deal less than the 700 potency WHM can do, and the fairy's 250 potency (though significantly weaker than this in effect due to the lower stats fairies have compared to us) every 3 seconds isn't enough to bring that average up, especially when you add in the whm can keep a 150 potency/3 seconds regen on top of already doing sizably more healing than sch.

Sustain also carried the advantage of not requiring you to target your fairy to heal her. Yes, physick can heal about as much and instantly, but you have to target your fairy first, which is less of an issue in 4-man content, but is far more of an issue in 8-man content, since you can't just hit an F# key to target her quickly. You could also use sustain when she didn't need the full physick potency and it would most likely still be healing her when she takes more damage. As for placement, that only does so much, and isn't really very possible during large pulls in dungeons where aoe's flying around randomly because of the tank constantly having to move to avoid said aoe.

SCH's not useless, and I'm sure it can do the content, but it's definitely weaker than the other two healers by a good deal, and it's not in a *good* place right now. I don't think it would take much to get it in a good place, though. Return Embrace to 300 potency and give Physick another 50 potency (maybe even 100, but that *might* be a little too much, not sure) would be the easiest ways to fix it. Giving sustain back would be a great QoL improvement, so we don't have to worry about having to try to target a 9th party member, and SMNs need it back even more, since they don't have the option of targeting their pet and casting Physick on it for ~25% of its HP, and it's especially a pain for any of the healers to need to try to keep track of the HP of a pet not your own, much less targeting them to heal them, and can potentially make for healing a 10th/11th/12th/13th party member (not that you're likely to have 4 summoners lol) if we do try. X3

Honestly, I feel like one of the problems SE had when pruning away "rarely used" abilities is that they focused too much on the usage statistics and didn't fully consider context. Far too many SMNs and SCHs completely ignored their pets' HP and never bothered using sustain (and there's plenty of opportunities in most content to use sustain without reducing your dps) even though they should have been using it. If they adjusted the usage statistics to rule out bad players who just don't bother using an important tool, they'd have likely chosen to keep Sustain in the game. They also clearly ignored how important it is on smn for solo content.

[YanderePrincess]

snip

Most the time when the fairy does take aoe damage, it's from an aoe that the rest of the party has avoided, so you won't be casting an aoe heal, and if you're just referring to whispering dawn healing it up, yeah, it would be enough. That doesn't stop the fairy from continuing to heal herself with Embrace in the meantime, and whispering dawn's only up 1/3rd of the time. ADmittedly, sustain didn't completely stop it either, but healed her up much faster than whispering dawn, so she spent less time using Embrace on herself, especially since the potency was also higher on Embrace back then, so it took fewer embraces as well.

And yes, you can micro your Fairy's embraces to force her to use it on a party member instead of on herself, but that's meaning every 3 seconds you have to be targeting an ally, which is going to eat into your DPS, and one of the things about SCH is they're supposed to be able to spend more time DPSing because they can do that while the fairy is healing.

Also, if you actually bother reading what I typed, you'll see I did not discount the shields from SCH. I didn't include the crit adlo shield because of how unreliable it is. It's absolutely wonderful when it happens, but you're looking at *maybe* 1 in 5 adlos critting, and you can't afford to cast adlo anywhere near as often as you could in the past, making those crit adlos even rarer (not lower % chance, but just fewer in total number since you're casting fewer adlos overall).

As for alternating Adlo+Physick, that's 600 potency + 400 potency every 2GCDs for 2196 mp (at lv68, don't have the lv70 mp values available to me atm). Even if we do something similar on whm (alternate Cure II+Cure I), that's 700 potency + 450 potency for 1800mp (at lv70), with a 15% chance of the Cure II being free if you're being smart and using Cure first and Cure II second. WHM can instead just do Cure II + Cure II for 2400mp (which isn't gonna be much different than the lv70 Adlo+Physick mp cost at 70 by the looks of it) and 700+700 potency.

[Dregenfox]

As for alternating Adlo+Physick, that's 600 potency + 400 potency every 2GCDs for 2196 mp (at lv68, don't have the lv70 mp values available to me atm). Even if we do something similar on whm (alternate Cure II+Cure I), that's 700 potency + 450 potency for 1800mp (at lv70), with a 15% chance of the Cure II being free if you're being smart and using Cure first and Cure II second. WHM can instead just do Cure II + Cure II for 2400mp (which isn't gonna be much different than the lv70 Adlo+Physick mp cost at 70 by the looks of it) and 700+700 potency.

You can't compare oGCD potencies with GCD's because GCD's have an opportunity/time cost. You can't compare two skills directly in a vacuum because simply turning adlo into cure II will make SCH op. Cure II is stronger because it has to make up for SCH's large number of on-demand insta-heals.



Consider single-target healing over 45s - not gonna factor in clipping for simplicity

9x adlo + 9x physick = 9000 pot

whispering dawn = 667 pot

excog+lustrate+lustrate = 2000 pot

Fey Union = ~1000 pot

Total potency over 45s: 12667 pot

Now lets say over that 45s duration the faerie manages to get 5 roused embraces and 5 regular embraces for 2040 pot

Potency after embrace: 14707 pot

Now for White Mage:

16x cure II = 11200 pot
2x regen = 2100 pot
tetra + assize + plenary= 1450 pot

Total after 45s = 14750 pot

So the white mage comes out ~43 pot ahead, but will start to fall behind as the fight goes on due to having much higher cooldown times on their instants than scholar, as well as 1450 pot adlo crits.

They also have a much higher risk of overhealing due to regen ticks and no shields, though it's also possible for a scholar to have his shield wasted due to the target not taking damage.

Obviously I didn't account for more niche stuff with CD's >60s like WHM's asylum/bene or Scholar's Fey illumination/covenant/dissipation, but those are more for utility and to differentiate the classes.

Honestly the reason I prefer SCH single-target over WHM is because SCH has ~40% of it's healing as completely oGCD/passive, vs WHM who has like 15% at best. I've gone through entire dungeon runs without ever having to hardcast an adlo or physick.

[technole]

If your fairy is getting hurt or dies, that is usually your fault for putting her in a dangerous zone. I've done it just because of my poor positioning. I had no one but to blame myself in O4 Savage when she was in the ExDeath tank buster AoE instead of being placed. It's not a fairy fault, just your position and on-follow you have to mindful of, so placing is better.

You do realize things like Susano EX are healed without a single Cure I/Physick/Benefic? Even the tank busters are handled as-approripately without those tier 1 heals.

I should tell people to try taking Physick off their hotbars, and learn how to play without using that skill and how much better their lives might end up being if they start using their entire toolkit to heal. Most of the SCH healing should be Eos, oGCDs, Embrace, and exclusively tether for mega-pulls while doing damage. Adlos are fine for busters or heavy hit, but Physick/Adlo spamming is not what this job is.