It feels like SCH is slowly losing its identity

[Nerfworthy]

Does this mean the accursed days of having a mandatory pet cross hotbar on controller is over? If so, that's amazing and a massive boon.

You could always use pet abilities on your normal bar. Like the poster above, I had a macro tied to my summon pet ability to swap the abilities when I switched fairies. This is a massive nerf because now pet abilities trigger your GCD. Before they did not. Definitely not a boon..

The things I love about SCH are being stripped away, as demonstrated here. Being able to continue to dps while ordering my fairy to heal at the same time is amazing. It really separated the good SCH from the great SCH to be able to micro-manage like that.

[Eloah]

I've loved SCH for the identity of being a combat medic, someone who uses poisons in battle and also heals with the help of a fairy partner. Their Nymian lore and history is fascinating and I love Tonberries most of all. I can't help but feel like with no new class quests, and the stripping of a large portion of our dots and dps abilities in general, we are being robbed of some of our identity. Fairy abilities becoming player actions removes complexity that I enjoyed. This has nothing to do with "muh parse" but merely the "feelscraft" and identity of playing SCH as a main.

OMG! This is exactly what I've been saying. SCHs felt like a combat medic, and the poisons they used were for offense and defense, since using poisons to heal is a real thing. I liked how they had skills that focused on "implied" military tactics. Not to mention the ARN lore leading up to the SCH quests and the quests there after created a very cohesive lore. But now they just keep shoving the fairy down our throat. SCH should have kept the poison skills not SMN. It's all just fallen apart in my opinion. Well at least it's still fun to play... oh wait.

[Nerfworthy]

OMG! This is exactly what I've been saying. SCHs felt like a combat medic, and the poisons they used were for offense and defense, since using poisons to heal is a real thing. I liked how they had skills that focused on "implied" military tactics. Not to mention the ARN lore leading up to the SCH quests and the quests there after created a very cohesive lore. But now they just keep shoving the fairy down our throat. SCH should have kept the poison skills not SMN. It's all just fallen apart in my opinion. Well at least it's still fun to play... oh wait.

I agree 100%... The fairy to me is an extension of my toolkit, but the focus is being put on the fairy too much now, instead of on the SCH.

[LegoTechnic]

OMG! This is exactly what I've been saying. SCHs felt like a combat medic, and the poisons they used were for offense and defense, since using poisons to heal is a real thing. I liked how they had skills that focused on "implied" military tactics. Not to mention the ARN lore leading up to the SCH quests and the quests there after created a very cohesive lore. But now they just keep shoving the fairy down our throat. SCH should have kept the poison skills not SMN. It's all just fallen apart in my opinion. Well at least it's still fun to play... oh wait.

To be blunt, SCH's lore has been almost complete garbage since Heavensward. It was great all the way through ARR and the tie-in to Wanderer's Palace was a good stopping point, and then in HW's class quests you spend your time being yelled at by a tonberry drill instructor until you eventually uncover a disease-demon that lives in a chamber pot. Of course, this was still better than in Stormsblood where you spend your entire time helping a Lalafel flirt with a tonberry. It all stands in extremely stark contrast to SMN, which all SCHs obviously leveled, who spent HW running around with Y'shtola's sister and dramatically getting in tune with Bahamut, and SB uncovering the danger of a rogue Allagan death-node and taking it out in a solo-raid-boss encounter (the talking book was admittedly annoying, though).

SCH lore has been pretty bland for a while now, and has just kind of stagnated slowly in the Tonberry plot without actually going anywhere. It's likely the Seraph fairy form is the end point of the class lore progression, and they're just taking their time getting to it.

[Nerfworthy]

SCH lore has been pretty bland for a while now, and has just kind of stagnated slowly in the Tonberry plot without actually going anywhere. It's likely the Seraph fairy form is the end point of the class lore progression, and they're just taking their time getting to it.

Here I was hoping we would eventually get a little Tonberry as a pet... :')

[Loki]

I feel like healers have been downgraded instead of tanks/dps i don't find that really fair, does SE plays healers jobs seriously? We could doubt about it when i see all thoses stupid changes that impact even the lore itself. And we have never asked to have 3 similars healers.

Lots of people say we will have to heal more in ShB but if it's the case and by seeing this 10k mp max.... it will be really borring to spam only heals every second.....

I was really hyped about the add on but since i know my fav job (sch) will be like this...i even regret to have bought ShB so early and the deluxe one.....

SE said they didn't want to put some support jobs cause it would be too complicated for players (we aren't all stupid SE u know.... >.< ) but now they erase the few buffs (brd/ast for example) and add a support job like the DNC while they make healers jobs borring....To me it looks like they don't know what they are doing, they do 3 steps ahead then 3 steps backward....

[Exiled_Tonberry]

Welcome to WHMs life. I swear the term "pure healer" is a freaking death sentence.

[Kanehana]

Not just SCH, but all healers doing more healing with some of their unique tools being taken away really damps my spirits. It's one thing to heal, but what can we, as healers, bring to the table other than that? AST had really nice buff cards, WHM has a party-wide regen, and SCH could slip in lots of DoTs while having a healing pet. Now, AST exclusively seems to do Balance, WHM just seems to have more healing, and SCH gets most of their DPS taken away while fairy abilities triggers GCD.

I just sincerely hope they knew what they were doing when they did this, and that healing still somehow remains fun, instead of just being there for the sake of looking pretty and slapping a band-aid on some wounds.

[Brandedblade]

biolysis noun
bi·​ol·​y·​sis | \ bī-ˈäl-ə-səs \
plural biolyses\ -​ˌsēz \
Medical Definition of biolysis
: decomposition by living organisms of sewage and other complex materials

Your dot is literally making a target rot by implied bacterial means, idk that sounds pretty poisonous to me. The Japanese name for it even references Koduku, that whole thing where you throw a bunch of poisonous creatures into a jar and make a very potent poison from the survivor.

But on a more serious note, we must have different ideas of what scholars' identity is. To me the identity was the fairy and the use of tactical thinking, pre-planning (the shielding and damage mitigation) and quick reactions to variants (the ogcd/aetherflow heals) in your plans. While yes, some element of the resource management is gone now. The basic theme of a tactician is still heavily in place. You're still utilizing shields and reacting to the damage that goes through the shields with proper use of your fairy and aetherflow skills.

The whole point of the fairy was the fact that Nymian scholars had to play the role of healers in their armies, and needed a way to compensate for not having access to the White Magic of Amdapor. So I would argue that they are very much vital to sch's identity.

[Truen]

Not just SCH, but all healers doing more healing with some of their unique tools being taken away really damps my spirits. It's one thing to heal, but what can we, as healers, bring to the table other than that? AST had really nice buff cards, WHM has a party-wide regen, and SCH could slip in lots of DoTs while having a healing pet. Now, AST exclusively seems to do Balance, WHM just seems to have more healing, and SCH gets most of their DPS taken away while fairy abilities triggers GCD.

Well said; you summarized everything I feel into one paragraph. I couldn't agree more.