Post 5.05 SCH suggestions

[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.

[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!

[Sloprano]

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.

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

Oh yeah, if this comes to pass I would very much prefer the old system of the seperate pet hotbar with full manual control over the skills like we had to get the most out of Embrace. Would that be the pGCDs? Pet-global cooldowns? Either way, the way to choose if Lily healed on a strict : Scholar hp <80% and then everyone else or we could override it any time. Preferably with a stronger Embrace so it can reliably pull someone out of danger.

Had idea for something like:

Summon Eos to call forth a healer-aspected Lily and grants the Scholar "Nymian field healing." Increasing healing of spells and abilities by 10%.

Summnon Selene to call forth a support-aspected Lily and grants the Scholar "Nymian offensive maneuver." Increasing damage dealt by the scholar by 20% while reducing all healing by 50%.

With all offensive spells reduced and by having Selene out we are effectivelly on the same level as before.Trick to make something unique for Seraph and boost shield is that our shields already boosted by how much healing done. So either make Eos only affect healing, like 10% of healing done to a target is applied as a seperate spell.

If fairies should play a such huge role I agree, instant summon in battle with cooldown would probably be necessary to quickly swap to the one you need. Preferably keep the cast time when out of combat, I do like the summoning animation.

[Wawachume]

Also, I would suggest making indom a 3 second cast and lowering its area of effect or something in return. Scholars just dont have the same utility in ape healing as the other two classes. Their shields are also initially lower than astro so anything to bring them closer would be great. Maybe making galvanize a stronger % while crit carterize has a lower % to compliment but still give you the extra shield satisfaction.

Nocturnal astrologian may have better shields. But every time I play scholar, I think, "I'm so glad I have these shields," and every time I play nocturnal I think, "this is pointless and I should go back to diurnal". The high potencies of nocturnal shields are basically a bandaid that tries, not very successfully, to cover up the fact that nocturnal isn't much of a shield healer because it lacks both the toolkit to complement the shields and the mana to sustain them.

The thing with a shield healer is that you can't have just preventive heals, because then the class is only useful in a meticulously-planned and -executed setting like a static raid group, and becomes pointless in something like a pug dungeon run. So scholar has some throughput heals to make up for this weakness, but for balancing reasons they're not spammable like the other healers'. Scholar very deliberately doesn't have medica. But it does have indomitability, whispering dawn, emergency tactics, fey blessing, and consolation, which I think is more than enough.

And indomitability is one of my favorite spells---mostly for the dramatic effect, which depends on it being high-potency, off-GCD, and on a longish cooldown.