Any word on SCH healing potency?

[inhaledcorn]

4.X also gave us Aetherpact/Fey Union. While not a bad ability - merely disappointing as a capstone - it has introduced a new problem to the class's gameplay as well as exacerbated an old one. The Pet AI in this game is terrible, and just about every SCH/SMN player has known this for a long time. Fey Union has brought this even more into the spotlight than it was before by giving SCH an Enkindle equivalent; a skill that is not a direct pet ability, but instead a player ability that commands the pet to take an action. This, for some reason, does not seem to properly enter the pet's GCD queue, so it is entirely possible for the Fairy to decide to just.... not tether to your target, and instead just continue casting Embrace on random people who are going to be topped up by regens anyway. Fey Union also has negative synergy with Dissipation, last expansions even more disappointing capstone ability. While Dissipation doesn't 0 out the Fairy Gauge like some have claimed (It removes

To be frank, at this point, I'd actually like all pets behave like Bahamut: the pet follows the master and doesn't execute an action until the master does (for SMN, doesn't execute their basic attack unless a damage spell with a cast time is used [so abilities do not trigger the attacks]), and the three pet abilities are rolled back into cooldowns usable by the SMN/SCH that change depending on the pet (Bahamut would use the same abilities as the pet he overwrites). This way, the problem of "I gotta finish what I'm doing before I do what you want" is reduced. Personally, I'd like to see the SMN pets to support-debuffer (Garuda), single target dps (Ifrit), and multi-target dps (Titan) (Garuda is better in 8 man raids. Ifrit better for 4 man bosses and solo content. Titan is for dungeon trash.). The SCH pets get redefined as a Regen pet (Eos) and Shield pet (Selene).

[Skye_]

LOL, wow so now I'm reading (from someone a page or two back) that SCH needs buffs because some people suck at healing?

People just want to go back to not having to actually work at healing. It's too hard to actually heal.

[Kabzy]

People just want to go back to not having to actually work at healing. It's too hard to actually heal.

Not that I disagree with you, but it's not quite so black and white with SCH. If they were to buff the passive healing that the Faerie brings, then SCH can focus more on DPS while 'supporting' the other healer. I actually would like SCH to be more pet focused so you can get that sort of healing but you need to actually execute and work for it.

Though I would be opposed to implementing that in 4.x, mainly because it would once again give SCH a monopoly in raid spots. I think an actual hybrid healer role needs to be created for 5.0, alongside a fourth healer who can do something similar.

They can buff healing as much as they want, or not. Healing still isn't hard in this game. When your co-healer WHM or AST can deal with pretty much all the healing, the second job needs to have something else going for it. Either that or they actually boost healing requirements, which doesn't seem to be happening any time soon. Not everyone wants to play like WHM and D.AST

[Riyshn]

To be frank, at this point, I'd actually like all pets behave like Bahamut: the pet follows the master and doesn't execute an action until the master does (for SMN, doesn't execute their basic attack unless a damage spell with a cast time is used [so abilities do not trigger the attacks]), and the three pet abilities are rolled back into cooldowns usable by the SMN/SCH that change depending on the pet (Bahamut would use the same abilities as the pet he overwrites). This way, the problem of "I gotta finish what I'm doing before I do what you want" is reduced.

That just sounds like it's "fixing" the problem of bad Pet AI by removing the Pet AI completely. The number 1 complaint about Bahamut is that he does exactly what you're describing - follows even when there's no need to. It also removed the "pet" part if they don't have an independent GCD and effectively turns them into a buff with an HP bar instead of a time limit.

[inhaledcorn]

That just sounds like it's "fixing" the problem of bad Pet AI by removing the Pet AI completely. The number 1 complaint about Bahamut is that he does exactly what you're describing - follows even when there's no need to. It also removed the "pet" part if they don't have an independent GCD and effectively turns them into a buff with an HP bar instead of a time limit.

There's also the problem that Bahamut is the only pet like that (and Bahamut also counts abilities for attacks). The other pets still use their independent AI, so SMN has moments where it's business as usual, then there are times where it has to turret to get the most damage, which is weird since it's not uniform. Then there's the additional problem that Bahamut isn't considered on the field, so Titan is completely irrelevant when Bahamut is out.

Maybe not necessarily Bahamut, but more like PvP Eos, just not tied to fairy gauge (maybe).

[ArisIllusoire]

even in sb dungeons i find sch to be the easiest healer to actually heal with. the always healing fairy is a nice buffer. sure the dps rotation is more involved, but it should be with how easy healing is. sch feels very powerful to me.

my problem with sch is...what is it's identity? it's a powerful class, but it feels all over the place. is it a pet class, an oGCD healer, a shield healer? oh it's all of them? well ideally we dont even want to use our GCD adloquium anymore. but there it is, taking up space on our skill bar. (and it's one of my favorite skill effects.)

i think sch is balanced, but i dont like playing it anymore...

[EllieShadeflare]

A lot of the changes to SCH have hit it very hard, and looking at the overall healer changes from 3.x to 4.0 seems to indicate that the Dev team wanted to incentivise Astrologian more, nerf Scholar to not be an auto include, and keep White Mage solid as a progression healer that holds its own in raids through sheer healing and damage.

While White Mage hits its mark, Scholar and Astrologian swapped positions. Now, Scholar is, by comparison, hot garbage and Astrologian is the new cheese.

While Astrologian now heals far stronger than a White Mage and has far better utility than Scholar, Scholar had been hit by a bunch of nerfs and changes that force Scholars into a position that almost contradicts the class design.

Regarding Scholar's oGCD heals, we never had to rely on them as our "PRIMARY" heals before, but that's because we used barriers + fairy as our heal, with Lustrate and Indom as first tier "oops" buttons, and Physick as our last line of defense. In Stormblood, the new meta seems to revolve around using the Aetherflow heals as often as possible because our GCD heals can't help anyone, our Fairy can barely hold up her own weight with a mere 165 potency per heal. That's basically just a slightly better Regen... in an arsenal of nothing but oGCDs, overcosted/underpowered barriers, and what basically amounts to a weak Cure 1 analogue. We still have one of the only objectively bad healing cooldowns (seriously, whose idea was it to make Dissipitation!? Three aetherflow stacks and a higher healing potency only barely makes up losing our fairy for 30s... though, to be fair, it's a little more reasonable after the fairy is THIS useless anyway) and Fey Union is linked to many of the issues that have already been seen with Devotion and Enkindle.

This new moveset just feels... wrong. It feels like they didn't know what they were doing with SCH, much more so than with Machinist and Summoner.

[Connor]

Personally I think the 'issue' with Scholar is that the potency of it's healing has shifted to being even more oGCD based. Most of its healing should be coming from Excogitation, Indomitability, Lustrate, Union, etc.
Most of it's normal, GCD healing should be avoided, particularly Physick. This creates a situation where your healing is entirely based on utilising your cooldown properly, which results in an arguably more difficult time meeting higher healing requirements than if one were a White Mage or Astrologian.

Honestly I think Scholar would benefit most from shifting the potency of it's healing back from being cooldown reliant to shield / direct heal reliant.
This would then create a situation where you're using your actual healing spells to heal, and not having to do it entirely through cooldowns. I'm not saying that aetherflow or cooldown management shouldn't be a thing, but it should't be supplementary to our healing, not the main source of it. That defeats the purpose of having the healing spells in the first place.

It's also worth considering that healing boosts from abilities like Largesse and Dissipation would become more valuable to a Scholar since they would be healing with spells as opposed to abilities.

Personally I'd rather they give the fairies updates to their abilities than increase their healing potency. I feel like this would just create a situation similar to what we have now. where we're reliant on the fairy for healing instead of cooldowns, and not actually doing any healing ourself. I feel like Selene in particular could have some of her skills looked at, particularly Fey Wind and Silent Dusk

[Dregenfox]

I'm legitimately interested in seeing if this is the case now with the re-addition of Miasma II.

As such, I'll lay down the gauntlet - Temple of the Fist - 3.4k dps with large pulls

It was an ~18 minute solo queue run so no preplanned tank cooldowns or such, I was still iLvl 323 at the time, solo queue roulette, whilst I initially thought I had hit the jackpot with two bards, only one of them sang foes more than once =(

Perhaps more relevantly, I peak at between 7 and 9k dps on the larger trash pulls, but hold a little over 2k dps on the bosses.

Show me yo moves!

Well I did manage to finally get a decent run with a tank that did multi-pulls but for some reason it wasn't uploading that encounter to fflogs...tried to find the log file but it was missing. I did take a screenshot of the ACT but obviously the healing will be higher. Ilvl 323.

https://i.imgur.com/qzUOtyE.png

For that mega-pull I was able to reach 9.8k dps but the regular pulls were hovering anywhere from 4-6k dps.

I think for SCH the main thing holding them back from higher DPS is not having the 4s stun from holy. There were times where I had to stop and adlo spam or else the tank would die. Pretty funny how low the tank dps is though in comparison to the rest of the group. I guess pally aoe is pretty lackluster.

Also WHM will have higher DPS single-target obviously since those boss fights are pretty light on healing and can be handled by regen and oGCD pretty much. I averaged around 1.5 - 1.7k dps for bosses. SCH admittedly don't have an answer to the straight DPS of Aero II + Stone IV spam, though chain strategem helps make up the difference.

I'll try some more parses later to see if I can pass 3.4k.

[Lastelli]

I think for SCH the main thing holding them back from higher DPS is not having the 4s stun from holy. There were times where I had to stop and adlo spam or else the tank would die. Pretty funny how low the tank dps is though in comparison to the rest of the group. I guess pally aoe is pretty lackluster.

I agree. That stun on holy works wonders. However, I think it's pretty obvious that WHM aoe dps is superior and easier to output. But SCH is very good as well.
I tried a couple dungeons as well, but unfortunately the parties I found didn't allow me to do great dps, I was doing around 2.5k. I believe that a good party may allow SCH to reach WHM dps though.
On a large enough group of mobs (6+ targets) miasma 2 and holy are actually very close in terms of damage.