Post 5.05 SCH suggestions

[Sloprano]

Something that I saw SE refer to is how Scholar is the "shield-healer" which I think is erroneous. It's true I put up shields when I'm expecting unavoidable or even avoidable damage, but there is and was so much more. The fairy skills to multimanage for healing/HoT/Magic damage res/Healing up/AoE Esuna/Haste, there were dots with debuffs on them, Ruin II with Blind, Virus to reduce STR/DEX/INT/MND, Shadowflare with slow, E4E to reduce damage, Sacred Soil for less damage taken, a 3-a-minute resource for either strong healing, Sacred Soil or trade for damage/mp/hp and the Fey Gauge the job could utilize in so many other ways.

I think it would be a start if Scholar would be recognized as the mitigating healer, reducing damage before it happens and exploiting the mobs to do less damage to the party. Also to nail the feeling of a battlefield tactician and medic they reflect on in the job description and quests. The job had inconveniences, the fun was to learn to work around them. A unique playstyle that I believe they should go all out for to make Scholar, but also rest of the healing jobs look and feel unique in what they do best at.

[ksuyen]

Since 75% of my heals depends on shield (even Excog is a type of shield), I am pretty confident to still call it a shield healer. However, I wouldn't argue that in order to bring all healers equal (balance) in terms of their skill sets in this expansion the dev had removed and changed a few things that most healers (including scholar) wouldn't be happy with. As a result of streamlining, each healer lost a bit of its unique identity. Perhaps it is time for dev to give each healers back its uniqueness without being too OP. Yes, the risk of being different is that one could be seen to be more powerful than the others (and the opposite reactions would happen): people start complaining why WHM doesn't have this, why AST have that, why SCH can't have what WHM have, etc. The cycles never end.

[Sloprano]

Since 75% of my heals depends on shield (even Excog is a type of shield), I am pretty confident to still call it a shield healer. However, I wouldn't argue that in order to bring all healers equal (balance) in terms of their skill sets in this expansion the dev had removed and changed a few things that most healers (including scholar) wouldn't be happy with. As a result of streamlining, each healer lost a bit of its unique identity. Perhaps it is time for dev to give each healers back its uniqueness without being too OP. Yes, the risk of being different is that one could be seen to be more powerful than the others (and the opposite reactions would happen): people start complaining why WHM doesn't have this, why AST have that, why SCH can't have what WHM have, etc. The cycles never end.

Good thinking. Could definitley see Excog reworked as a shield instead of heal, needing a second trigger like Divine Veil.

The protesting will continue, that I am sure of. If nobody complained it would mean there were perfect and perfect is boring. I am to admit I have no idea how much discussion there was here before 5.0, I just got here after the changes to Scholar. If others are to believe, this is the most active this subforum have been in a while. I might be completely wrong on that.

Since I never got here before it was because the job I liked fit me like a glove and it seems to have been the healer that was unique in that it inherited dps skills and tools, might've made it overpowered even. Then the solution, I believe, is evident, bump up and make all the healers overpowered. Make them ridiculous and fun to play. DPS jobs have had no trouble waltzing over solo and party content, enjoying a large suite of skills to remove healthbars quickly as possible. Looking at how Paladin went from the rock in 2.0 to in 5.0 constantly barraging mobs with combos and spells with a side dish of cooldowns I like to think the solution is clear: Make sure all the Healer jobs feels good to play in unique ways of doing damage and healing FIRST, then worry about potencies.

We got this threads for ideas so let's fill it up and see if SE takes notice.

Along with Eos and Selene restored to former glory, would like to see Seraph be a full summon aswell. What with Eos healing and buffing and Selene supporting, Seraph could be the full-time shielding fairy with her skills costing Gauge and not sharing cooldown with the other faerie's skills, but is put on a 2min cooldown if sent away.

[Hatstand]

Along with Eos and Selene restored to former glory, would like to see Seraph be a full summon aswell. What with Eos healing and buffing and Selene supporting, Seraph could be the full-time shielding fairy with her skills costing Gauge and not sharing cooldown with the other faerie's skills, but is put on a 2min cooldown if sent away.

I doubt they’d put Selene back exactly as she was, and I kind of don’t want them to, since she never saw much use since she got nerfed anyway. (Although I’d rather have her back as she was than not at all). But... if Eos was going to be the healing fairy, and Seraph was going to be the shielding fairy, I’d like Selene to be the buffing fairy again. Maybe make her into kind of what cleric stance used to be: turn off her embrace and instead give a passive damage buff to the healer (nerf current potencies so that she’d bring the SCH back up to where they are now if the extra damage is a problem). Combine that with the instant summon that summoners already have and swapping between fairies could become a dynamic thing (but still one you’d have to be careful of since you’d lose an embrace when the summoned fairy was changing due to animations).

Leave the aoe cleanse. That’s a great ability (although I agree it would be better suited to WHM, but in the meantime, why not?) and make her buff single target, but a little bit stronger. If they’re worried about buffing making certain combinations meta, a single target buff would be much easier to balance.

Also, this would make Selene the perfect fairy for solo. Buff your own damage, while also removing your auto-heal, forcing you to actually use your healing kit (which is currently pretty much useless in solo content). Plus, choices are wonderful, and being able to choose between better healing and better damage is something I always love in a healer (Presence of Mind is one of my favourite abilities in the game, because it can be used both offensively and defensively).

Ofc, they’d need to either nerf SCH’s base damage potencies to make up for the gain of both the passive and the acfive buff, or buff the other healers a bit, but like you I’m more worried about playstyle than potency, so I’ll leave the balancing to the devs. I’d rather they overnerf SCH potencies and make SCH fun again than leave it as is.

Also, I don’t mind Seraph sharing cooldowns with the other fairies, so long as she has unique abilities for those shared cooldowns, like the fairies used to.

[Sloprano]

Also, this would make Selene the perfect fairy for solo. Buff your own damage, while also removing your auto-heal, forcing you to actually use your healing kit (which is currently pretty much useless in solo content). Plus, choices are wonderful, and being able to choose between better healing and better damage is something I always love in a healer (Presence of Mind is one of my favourite abilities in the game, because it can be used both offensively and defensively).

The idea that fairies affect the scholar in more ways than just what's on the pet hotbar, and very much more than just being color swaps, is very interesting. We already got Eos from the moment we aquire the Scholar crystal so she could give a passive to healing, and Selene a passive buff to flat damage (or just dots). Instead of cutting of Embrace I'd rather see the Cleric stance downside: reduced healing on the scholar whenever Selene is out and have a 5 second grace period where she can't be sent away. Lastely

Something more impactful than Fey Wind would be welcome, and would like to see Fey Caress stay if only for Deep Dungeons.

Hang on, what if Eos gets Embrace (heal), Seraph gets Veil (shield) and Selene could get Encouragement. Looking how all of Ast's cards got turned into Balance, I'm reluctant to say "increase damage for a % for x seconds." There must be something more interesting to increase.

Being fan of stances that gives as much downsides as upsides, forcing you to swap between, need to think of something more they could do.

[EpicOverlord85]

Bane, Aether flow out of combat, and the quickened Aether flow trait are all things we need back still. That and Selene

[nalol]

[*]Remove "Only usable during combat" from Aetherflow.
It’s awkward, unnecessary and causes frustration.[/LIST]
I wouldn't mind seeing something like setting up Selene to have some utility for solo play, instead of just lazily making her a copy of Eos, but I don’t have suggestions for that. I think the above changes would do the trick in general though. Thoughts?

with giing us ED back .. idt they would change that .. because it would mean again we could use ED 3 times at start of dongeon and recast AF quickly after without any downsides

[Connor]

I think most of these are good ideas for Scholar. The only thing I’m unsure about would be consolidating Deployment and Bane. It’s a cool idea, but with the cooldown on Deployment it’d be much less readily available than Bane was. And if they made it use Aetherflow with a shorter cooldown, the shield spreading aspect may be a bit overpowered. Still though, it does sound like it would make Deployment even more interesting to use. An alternative but similar idea I can think of could be to have Deployment Tactics convert shields into direct damage to nearby enemies, though it would need a static potency rather than scaling just off the shield to avoid being too powerful.

In terms of Selene, I feel like this is the exact same situation as with Bard and Dancer. The devs saw that two jobs within the same role both offered utility, and instead of reworking Selene’s abilities to create a utility fairy that won’t step in Astrologian’s toes, they just removed the support spells from whichever of the two is the ‘less supportive’

[Hatstand]

Hang on, what if Eos gets Embrace (heal), Seraph gets Veil (shield) and Selene could get Encouragement. Looking how all of Ast's cards got turned into Balance, I'm reluctant to say "increase damage for a % for x seconds." There must be something more interesting to increase.

I thought about this, but I don’t like the idea of Selene just randomly buffing whoever. And if she’s designed to do it to everyone in turn you may as well just make it an aoe aura. Maybe if they let us manually control embrace again, it could work. Maybe, rather than x seconds, it could be just for the next action, and that way we wouldn’t lose anything by the AI automatically overriding its own buff. Again, this would be better if we could manually target it.

When it comes down to it, I don’t really mind the fairy cooldowns being abilities (although I wish they’d respond like abilities and go off right away) since it gives opportunities for weaving (although I also wish they’d make ruin 2 into a more worthwhile weaving tool). I really would like to be able to control just embrace separately from our own gcd, though. I really liked being able to control it directly, and if it was an ability then it just wouldn’t be worth weaving most of the time when she’s going to heal someone automatically anyway.

I do like the idea of each fairy positively (and by proxy negatively) affecting each of your capabilities. Perhaps Seraph could raise the potency if your shields a little while she was out. (So Eos was more pure-heal-y and HoT-y mode and Seraph was shieldy mode). You’d probably have to lower their base potencies for both heals and shields (before pulling out a fairy pulled you just a little ahead in one or the other), but I think it could be quite fun having to decide that now was the time for burst shielding, and then switching back to heal mode to fill people up behind the barriers.

I also like the idea of them being instant cast on a shared cooldown, so you’re locked in for a few seconds.

[Patt]

As others have mentioned there are a lot of really great ideas in this thread, some of them that I'd really like to see are:

Pet actions back on the pet GCD: They finally had this working in a really great way during the tailend of SB. Having to weave using the SCH GCD causes a lot of really weird bugs to appear, especially when transitioning to and from seraph (skills going on cooldown but not getting activated).


Manual targeting of embrace, or better priority: This is really nice to have for popping veil as well as now for forcing shields on the appropriate party members. SCH has the potential of having a really high skill cap and benefit with Seraph's shield now, but as it stands at the moment her single target shielding capabilities get largely wasted.


Aetherflow out of combat: As everyone and their mother has already suggested, please SE, not having AF useable outside of combat feels so bad!