SCH needs some nerfs

[Ghishlain]

===Snip===

SCH is not OP, can it be considered the best healer when all factors are tallied yes, but they are not OP. In fact when SB launched they were the worst, because so much of our kit was gutted. plus I notice a lot of back and forth between these two.

===Snip===

I'm going to take a shot at this because SCH's kit definitely caters to the current raid design that S-E has built. Even if it's unintentional catering, it's still catered too.

Raid design builds around set timelines and mechanics that need to be dealt with. Assuming everyone dodges mechanics correctly, this also means there is an exact amount of damage that needs to be healed for. That's why we have these fancy little time lines that we can build our cooldowns around.

SCH's kit is perfectly suitable for this style of healing. SCH is a cooldown based healer - Lustrate, Indom, Excog, Sacred Soil, Whispering Dawn, Fey Covenant, and Fey Union can all be used to repair or blunt damage on both single target and raid-wide busters without spending a GCD. Deployment Tactics can blunt more damage within a single GCD. When you can plan out ALL these tools, it leads to SCH spending a lot of heals with minimal GCD costs, and thus minimal loss of GCDs for DPS spells.

Let's take the O11S fight timeline I posted earlier and just focus on the raid busters:

SCH can

• [00:07] Indom the Atomic Ray
• [00:26] Fey Covenant and Whispering Dawn the Flamethrower
• [03:02] Indom the Delta Attack
• [03:36] Adlo and Deployment Tactics the Flamethower (GCD)
• [03:43] Indom the Ballistic Impact
• [04:16] Indom the Atomic Ray
• [04:30] Succor the Peripheral Synthesis (GCD)
• [04:48] Indom the Electric Slide
• [04:59] Whispering Dawn the Peripheral Synthesis
• [05:48] Sacred Soil, Fey Covenant, and Indom the Flamethrower
• [06:28] Whispering Dawn the Ballistics Damage
• [06:40] Adlo and Deployment Tactics the double Wave Cannon Kyrios (GCD)
• [06:50] Indom the Long Needle Kyrios
• [07:10] Succor the Atomic Ray (GCD)
• [07:58] Indom the Atomic Ray
• [08:07] Succor, Fey Covenant, and Whispering Dawn the Flamethrower
• [08:59] Indom the Engage Ballistics System
• [09:11] Adlo and Deployment Tactics the Double Wave Cannon Kyrios (GCD)
• [09:22] Whispering Dawn the Long Needle Kyrios
• [10:04] Indom the Charybdis
• [10:29] Whispering Dawn, Fey Covenant, Sacred Soil, Indom all the Atomic Rays

This probably isn't optimized either, nor have I accounted for all the variables. So, 21 AoE attacks and SCH only has to basically spend five GCDs to have some solution to all of that. Add in two or three Succors in between to help out, though your co-healer should be taking some of the healing off you as well.

In an ideal world, SCHs myriad of options means they should be the primary healer in the engagement, with the other healers providing back up with their own planned CD usages (Earthly Star, Asylum, Assize) or when necessary with GCD options because SCH's higher end GCD spells are significantly more MP-expensive than AST or WHM.

With SCHs taking the vast majority of the healing responsibilities, this opens up many more healer GCDs to use and thus be an overall rDPS increase to the party. This doesn't include the consistent damage SCH adds to the raid via Chain Strategem and of course the free GCD-free regen they have going for 3,696 potency/minute on the MT when you account for Rouse; let alone the 2,851 potency Fey Union gives when fully charged and consumed.

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What sucks with the situation is that buffing WHM or AST to SCHs level doesn't really help for two reasons:

• All healers are viable to clear the content. If we increase the power level of the healers, it just trivializes the content even further, from a healing perspective.
• All buffing a healer beyond each other is change the meta composition without changing the competitiveness of each healer. The kits are too similar to the point where the inferior healer will be deemed unsuitable because there are very few things in each healer kit that stands out.

I expect a shift in 5.0 because new expansion brings new tools. I don't quite know how they're gonna balance SCH though. I'm of opinion the SCH kit will always be meta because of how well crafted it is and how well it works with content design. The only time this isn't the case is when SCH is nerfed so hard it's skill ceiling is far too hard to attain without a ton of effort.

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TLDR: And combination of SCH's single target healing kit, raid healing kit, DPS buffing kit, and how well the SCH's kit design compliments the current raid designs allows SCH to shine as a healer at a much higher peak versus the other two healers.

[Eloah]

explaination

I'm not entirely sure what to say to this, nor why I was quoted. You didn't disagree with me, just broke down my concise point.

But one thing you have to take into account, is that the logic you stated can be applied at almost any time during the games duration. As you stated battles have a flow. The thing is that flow isn't constant and hiccups happen. From a healer perspective SCH, is good when things are planned, or right place right time. Have an "Oh Shite" moment, and a SCH might not be too great. It comes down to burst vs extended again, which SCH excels at, through no fault of their own, it's just the nature of the encounters.

[technole]

I'm not entirely sure what to say to this, nor why I was quoted. You didn't disagree with me, just broke down my concise point.

But one thing you have to take into account, is that the logic you stated can be applied at almost any time during the games duration. As you stated battles have a flow. The thing is that flow isn't constant and hiccups happen. From a healer perspective SCH, is good when things are planned, or right place right time. Have an "Oh Shite" moment, and a SCH might not be too great. It comes down to burst vs extended again, which SCH excels at, through no fault of their own, it's just the nature of the encounters.

I'd argue Scholar is the best healer for oh crap moments, raids or any content. Deployment Tactics is the single most important skill when you can't get people to full HP right away for mechanics. It's all about survival at minimal health. I even watched a Tiamat group basically abuse this in O11S to build LB3 faster.

SCH was not horrible at the beginning of 4.0, the cries in this forum were mostly people who couldn't even play the job correctly. Many were asking to cut Adlo and Succor costs, yet they were sitting on their darn Aetherflow too long. The timer reduction encourages Aetherflow usage and keeping it on cool down for optimal play and to keep MP flowing. You probably see a few players in normal content who still can't get this right.

Fast-forward to Sigmascape, where they finally were able to add the biggest QoL change to many jobs, activating instant skills right away. Such as AST CU and SCH fairy skills. It was at this point they were able to nerf Eos WD potency and Fey Illumination. I still believe they had this in-mind for awhile and they felt they couldn't just nerf Eos then when her skills weren't really "instant".

This raid tier design does favor oGCD healing, but that would apply to every raid tier. Anytime a healer doesn't have to spend a GCD to heal that adds more raid DPS potential. Part of the issue is crafted gear is very powerful along with Vitality melds at the beginning of a raid tier, that meeting the lower HP thresholds where healing doesn't require several more GCDs to make up for.

Until the battle designers get on-board with the idea of realizing they could amp up some numbers and mechanics to really make healers heals more, along with tuning minimum ilvl play harder.

[Ghishlain]

I'm not entirely sure what to say to this, nor why I was quoted. You didn't disagree with me, just broke down my concise point.

But one thing you have to take into account, is that the logic you stated can be applied at almost any time during the games duration. As you stated battles have a flow. The thing is that flow isn't constant and hiccups happen. From a healer perspective SCH, is good when things are planned, or right place right time. Have an "Oh Shite" moment, and a SCH might not be too great. It comes down to burst vs extended again, which SCH excels at, through no fault of their own, it's just the nature of the encounters.

I'm just explaining why I think SCH is too strong compared to the other two healers and also why at this juncture it may be better to knock SCH down a few pegs versus knocking the other two healers up a few pegs, since you were asking for asking for reasons why some players may feel the job is OP.

I also disagree with your premise that:

1. SCH shouldn't be healing in a raid setting - it has the best tools to deal with healing while not spending the precious commodity known as GCDs
2. Deployment Tactics needs fixing - it's one of the best mitigation tool in the game and enables so much LB cheese in the process; if anything I'd say it needs a nerf

I guess we'll see what happens in 5.0 since I don't expect any serious reworks of any kits until then, but I am hoping SCH can be brought a little bit more inline with the others.

[Eloah]

I'd argue Scholar is the best healer for oh crap moments, raids or any content.

SCH was not horrible at the beginning of 4.0, the cries in this forum were mostly people who couldn't even play the job correctly.

SCHs aren't bad at Oh Crap moments per se, it's their kit isn't really designed for it and the moves they have for it are oGCD moves. The biggest thing is SCH has no spammable AoE. But as you said other moves can make up for that bringing them up to par.

As for the 4.0 SCH, I wont say it was unplayable, since I did play it, the issue was more getting rid of skills, potency needs, and no compansation with new skills or adjustment of old ones. Excog was broken, as was the fairy gauge. They nerfed our healing output without giving us anything in return; lily and our mp regeneration was nerfed which played into how we calculated things. The marginalized our shields making them pointless since ASTs were larger and had a lesser mp cost. And they practically made out AoE 0 because they nerfed the heck out of Bane and removed Miasma II, which prior to 4.0 wasnt a widely used skill but still, and some players use blizzard II for AoE as well. Basically they stripped SCHs identity and gave nothing in return. Yeah WHM lillies are meh, but WHM kept everything that was important.

Not to mention, we still have the lowest base heal of the 3 healers, and that's technically our only/main healing move; that's a spell mind you. The rest of our kit is about shielding. I mean I want more shields, call me shield ho if you will, lol, but a Physick II might be nice someday. Also, this is just a general observation, not a complaint.

I just hope for 5.0 we dont have a repeat

I also disagree with your premise that:

1. SCH shouldn't be healing in a raid setting - it has the best tools to deal with healing while not spending the precious commodity known as GCDs
2. Deployment Tactics needs fixing - it's one of the best mitigation tool in the game and enables so much LB cheese in the process; if anything I'd say it needs a nerf

I never said SCH shouldn't heal in raid, that was a comment stating what the OP said.

Also Deployment Tactics does need fixing. You are right it is a good mitigation tool, but only when Adlo crits, which is where all the OP talk comes from spreading a regular Adlo is not much better than a Succor or a Aspected Helios. It is better don't get me wrong, but for an ability that can only be used ever 2 minutes, and on SCH no less it should be, since that's SCH gimmick.

Also, keep this in mind, yes, compared to Aspected Helios, a Deployed Adlo is better, but AST also has a spammable AoE heal without a shield attached. And one could argue that besides Indom, SCH doesn't even have an AoE heal. Aside from when Energency Tactics is used Succor is to be viewed as an an AoE shield, not a heal.

How can we fix Deployment Tactics and not break it or make it OP, I'm not sure. But, it does need a tweak. I will say personally its relation to Eye for an Eye needs adjusting.

[Jinzhu]

Let's take the O11S fight timeline I posted earlier and just focus on the raid busters:

SCH can

• [00:07] Indom the Atomic Ray
• [00:26] Fey Covenant and Whispering Dawn the Flamethrower
• [03:02] Indom the Delta Attack
• [03:36] Adlo and Deployment Tactics the Flamethower (GCD)
• [03:43] Indom the Ballistic Impact
• [04:16] Indom the Atomic Ray
• [04:30] Succor the Peripheral Synthesis (GCD)
• [04:48] Indom the Electric Slide
• [04:59] Whispering Dawn the Peripheral Synthesis
• [05:48] Sacred Soil, Fey Covenant, and Indom the Flamethrower
• [06:28] Whispering Dawn the Ballistics Damage
• [06:40] Adlo and Deployment Tactics the double Wave Cannon Kyrios (GCD)
• [06:50] Indom the Long Needle Kyrios
• [07:10] Succor the Atomic Ray (GCD)
• [07:58] Indom the Atomic Ray
• [08:07] Succor, Fey Covenant, and Whispering Dawn the Flamethrower
• [08:59] Indom the Engage Ballistics System
• [09:11] Adlo and Deployment Tactics the Double Wave Cannon Kyrios (GCD)
• [09:22] Whispering Dawn the Long Needle Kyrios
• [10:04] Indom the Charybdis
• [10:29] Whispering Dawn, Fey Covenant, Sacred Soil, Indom all the Atomic Rays

===

TLDR: And combination of SCH's single target healing kit, raid healing kit, DPS buffing kit, and how well the SCH's kit design compliments the current raid designs allows SCH to shine as a healer at a much higher peak versus the other two healers.

It's funny that you think SCHs kit caters to the raid tier when it really doesn't and ASTs kit actually does.

> [00:07] Indom the Atomic Ray. No point in doing that when Earthly Star covers it.
> [00:26] Fey Covenant and Whispering Dawn the Flamethrower. No point in running Selene when AST can just collective after Flamethrower and be smooth sailing.
> [03:02] Indom the Delta Attack. Why would you waste Indom on Delta Attack when you can just GCD heal since the boss isn't on the field to attack.
> [03:36] Adlo and Deployment Tactics the Flamethower (GCD). No point in using Indom when you can use succor before the boss is targetable and Earthly Star covers the damage.
> [03:43] Indom the Ballistic Impact. No point in using Indom when Earthly Star covers the damage.
> [04:16] Indom the Atomic Ray. No point in using Indom when Collective covers the damage.
> [04:30] Succor the Peripheral Synthesis (GCD). Don't see how this made the list of "SCHs kit works so well for this fight" when it's just preshielding.
> [04:48] Indom the Electric Slide. No need to indom when Earthly Star covers the damage.
> [04:59] Whispering Dawn the Peripheral Synthesis. This is okay.
> [05:48] Sacred Soil, Fey Covenant, and Indom the Flamethrower. Super overmitigated lol. Why waste Soil when at most you're going to drop down to is 20k. No need to soil or Indom because Earthly Star will cover the damage.
> [06:28] Whispering Dawn the Ballistics Damage. No ballistic missles here, you're thinking of the wrong flamethrower.
> [06:40] Adlo and Deployment Tactics the double Wave Cannon Kyrios (GCD). Not sure why you would waste Deploy here when Collective and Indom can solo this part.
> [06:50] Indom the Long Needle Kyrios. No need if you have collective.
> [07:10] Succor the Atomic Ray (GCD). Again not needed because Earthly Star covers the damage.
You missed the red fists. If anything you'd Deploy for the red fists and build a whole LB3 back from it.
> [07:58] Indom the Atomic Ray. No need to Indom because of Earthly Star.
> [08:07] Succor, Fey Covenant, and Whispering Dawn the Flamethrower. This is okay.
> [08:59] Indom the Engage Ballistics System. No need to when Earthly Star + Collective Cover the damage.
Literally afk all of Pantokrator 2 because AST is busted.

Now let's see whats more busted because it's definitely AST rather than SCH. This is true for each fights this raid tier and not just O11 either. ASTs kit compliments the current raid tier (and previous raid tiers but more so this raid tier cause of the new collective change) and allows them to shine as a healer at a much higher peak versus the other two.